


Term Of Duty

by Ankaret



Category: Marlow series - Forest
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-13
Updated: 2009-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:38:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nicola and Lawrie's first term in the Lower Sixth.  With netball, a Play, and an unexpected change of image for Helen Bagshaw.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Scarlet Hatband

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the world created by Antonia Forest and using characters created by her. _Make Me A World_ is copyright Jim Parker and Wally K. Daly.
> 
> I've chosen to set this in the late Eighties, a few years on from _Run Away Home_, as I don't think I'm capable of doing justice to modern-day Marlows with cell phones and Internet access.
> 
> Many thanks to Owl for beta-reading, and in particular for helping me to sort out who should be in which form and on what team! All errors remaining are mine.

"Well, since you ask, it is rather shattering," said Patrick carefully. "I suppose it wouldn't be, for you?"

"_Now_ it would," said Nicola candidly. "If it'd happened a few years ago I suppose it'd just have been another one to join the scrum. You'd have to ask Giles, really."

He gave a little grin that showed his teeth. "I may be on better terms with your esteemed brother than I was, but I don't think it stretches to barging matily up to him and asking how it felt when the place started filling up with little squawkers and their impedimenta. Though, _actually_ \- that _was_ quite how it felt, when your lot used to descend in a body on Trennels for the summer, way back when. One felt someone offstage had given the order to send in the troops, armoured pram division."

Nicola punched him on the arm in a friendly way. They were sitting on the Mariot Chase stable roof, a place that Nicola had only thought of as a possible place to sit the day before; they could see the stable-yard below them, and Sellars going about the business he had firmly discouraged them from helping with, and the hedge beyond stirring in the crisp September wind.

Patrick hugged one knee and let the other long leg dangle. "I mean... part of me thinks that it's perfectly normal and that it's really too Freudian for words for me to be shocked... or Oedipal, or whatever it is..." Nicola preserved respectful silence, not feeling she had enough acquaintance with either gentleman to judge, "... but part of me still thinks _ugh, and at their age too_. Wouldn't you?"

"It'd be a shock, all right, if Ma started ballooning round like..." _Like Esther's mother_, Nicola trapped herself into thinking. But Esther Frewen's half-sisters were presumably well past the pram stage by now; might, for all Nicola knew, be elder sisters themselves to yet more small Frewens and Thornes, and Esther herself had... left.

Oh, there was a story about her father getting a high-powered job as something to do with an European Commission and Esther being desperate to move to Brussels with him, her stepmother, and the Frewen half-sister. But surely Esther had been sent to Kingscote _because_ of things like that, particularly considering that there was another parent who was remaining in the country and might - if she hadn't been Mrs Thorne - be relied upon to take up the slack. Nicola had rather hoped that _Mr_ Thorne was better news than his wife, though one couldn't tell, really, from what Esther had said. "At least they won't expect you to re-home Bucket," she said, pretty much at random.

Patrick did up his windcheater a little tighter. "There _was_ a health visitor around last week clucking about _all these animals_," he said. Nicola looked away, relieved at having been misunderstood. "I think she was glad to find something to prove she wasn't wasting her time, MP's wives not being her usual line of business... I won't be _entirely_ surprised if I come home from Oxford one day and find Bucket following in the steps of the Bump, though."

"It won't be a Bump by then."

"It'll end up answering to Bump until it's twenty, you mark me," Patrick predicted darkly. He looked away. "And then I suppose there will be new arrivals in the gee department too. One can't call Blackleg an ideal child's first pony."

Nicola agreed that you couldn't, and shared milk chocolate from her zipped-up pocket; and they both ate for a while and watched the brindled horizon, and didn't talk about Mr Buster.

"There's a storm coming in," said Patrick finally. "My dear Mama would tell me to bring you inside before we both get drenched."

"I don't mind getting drenched," said Nicola hardily.

He gave another of those glancing smiles that warmed her like sun through water. "Neither do I."

And then, looking away again. "I suppose - I mean, I'd still be the Heir Apparent and all _that_ ghastly jazz - but when the Bump _is_ here - I mean - it'd make it easier for me to enter the Church. If that was what I wanted."

The storm-front was still rolling in, bruise-dark, across the Crowlands, so however it felt to Nicola, she couldn't possibly have been struck by lightning. "Is that..." she said tentatively, and then was lost for words: _is that something you feel called to do_ was too ghastly Careers-Day pious for words, but everything else sounded as if going into the Church was just another alternative to stacking shelves at Sainsburys. "Is that something you'd want to do? I mean - sorry - d'you mean be a _monk_, or what?"

"I don't know," he said slowly. "I was thinking more in terms of the priesthood, but I'm certainly not ruling it out." And then, with another glancing grin, "Oh, do stop looking so taken aback, Nicola my love! It _is_ something people our age are still allowed to do, you know. Your lot are even turning would-be vicars away because they'd prefer someone with twenty years in the Army or on the shop floor."

"I know it is," said Nicola, embarrassed. "I mean, I don't... sorry... oh, _drop_ it. But what - I mean, what if the Bump's a girl?"

"It's an equal-opportunity world these days, so they tell me."

"Tell that to the Navy," said Nicola with more than a trace of bitterness.

"Now is that the very particular Marlow family version of _tell it to the Marines_?"

Nicola coloured. "_No_. I just meant there are things you _can't_ do, even these days, if you're a Wren."

"Move to America," he suggested. "They have female captains over there."

She agreed, vaguely, that she just might. It started raining. After a while they both tacitly agreed that this kind of rain, poking like cold grey fingers down the collars of coats and slickly drenching the face and hair, was no fun at all and that it would be a good idea to wander inside in search of towels. Patrick, very politely, slithered down off the roof first and then held out both hands to catch Nicola round the waist and jump _her_ down. She still felt very odd; more like she'd been punched in the stomach than struck by lightning, now she came to think of it, and talking of thinking of it, she wasn't going to.

Mrs Merrick came out as far as the stableyard porch to meet them, wearing an exceptionally stylish waistless chartreuse affair that had clearly not come from any shop in Colebridge, nor even the jaunty maternity-wear boutique called _Blossoming Out!_ that had popped up in the Arcade in Wade Abbas. She bustled Nicola up to her own scented bathroom, leaving Patrick to manage as best he could in the downstairs cloakroom. Nicola towelled her hair, agonised briefly over the etiquette of borrowing someone else's comb versus going downstairs with her hair on end, and eventually did the best she could with palms and fingers. By the time she emerged into the bedroom, which looked museumish and unlikely as bedrooms in the daytime always did, Mrs Merrick had - rather to Nicola's relief - gone; Nicola paused only to be impressed that Patrick's mother had fresh flowers by her bedside, and hurried out onto the stairs.

The flowers were fortunate; they gave her something to say to Patrick's mother whilst Patrick was saying things like _yes_ and _I see_ in a very constrained voice down the telephone. He came back into the dining-room suppressing a grin.

"The last time I saw that look on your face, Pat, you'd rubbed your Aunt Florence's soup-plate with soap," said his mother dispassionately. "Who was that?"

"It was for you," he said properly, turning to Nicola, his eyes gleaming particularly gold as his mother snapped on the electric light against the gloom. "Your sister Lawrie."

"_Lawrie_?" asked Nicola, wreathed in relief that it hadn't been her mother. "Whatever's the matter?"

"You're wanted at home urgently." The relief dissipated. "Something to do with a parcel from the school outfitters."

If Helena Merrick hadn't been there, Nicola would have worked off her various feelings by saying _What?_ and _Huh?_ and _I haven't had anything to do with the school outfitters, that was all Ma's lookout_; as it was, she rubbed her still-damp hands on the dry stripe of skirt that had been covered by her coat, and said that she supposed she ought to go and thank-you-for-having-me to Mrs Merrick.

"Oh, I'll run you home," said Patrick. "It's far too wet to ride. I'll bring the Idiot back later."

Drenched hedgerows rushed by outside the Land Rover's windows: Nicola looked at her own hands, which were turning an _interesting_ shade of blue about the nails, and then at Patrick's hands on the steering-wheel, and didn't say anything about the Church.

She had thought the silence, if not companionable, at least not awkward, but Patrick evidently felt differently; he said, slightly diffidently, "So I suppose things will be different now you're in your Sixth."

"Yes _indeedy_," said Nicola with rather more enthusiasm than was needed. "Permish to wear our own clothes at weekends, not just evenings after dinner, and to go and buy coffee in town as long as we do it in pairs and promise to stay out of pubs, first two privileges _not_ to be combined, offer void where prohibited. Though, actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Keith clamped down on us going into Wade Abbas after all that fuss last term with those idiots Shirley Russel and Vivienne whatsit meeting boys from the Tech. Still, at least we're allowed to drape ourselves decoratively _all_ over the grounds to study in Free Periods rather than being confined to the library."

"That doesn't sound like you," he said with a sidelong glance. "Draping yourself anywhere, I mean."

Nicola wasn't sure what he meant. Her cheeks burned with what Mrs Bertie would undoubtedly diagnose as an early sign of pneumonia. "No - actually - it was Tim who said it."

"Oh, Lawrie's friend?"

"Aren't you the well-informed one?" she said in what would usually have been an affectionate tone of voice.

"Actually - you know I _like_ Lawrie, well enough - "

"That's generous of you."

"But I do wonder - if you don't mind me saying - how anyone can put up with her full-time. _Choose_ to, I mean." He drew the Land Rover up with a flourish and spatter of gravel in the Trennels drive, and looked rueful. "Oh dear. Things left better unsaid. It's just - well - she is a bit much. Don't you think? No, of course you don't. Never mind. Sorry pardon sorry all round."

"Ah, well, Tim's an acquired taste herself," said Nicola, feeling suddenly and inexplicably better. "Thanks for the lift, Patrick. 'Bye."

"'Bye," he said, and leaned across to plant a kiss on her cheek, except that she was swinging the door of the Land Rover open and rushing out into the rain before he could.

\--

"Look at all the times Nick's been form prefect and you haven't. I don't know why _you're_ so surprised," said Ginty, half addressing Lawrie and half conducting a dialogue with her own displeasure. "What _I_ don't see why is it had to come from the school outfitters at all, actually. Aren't there enough prefectly red hatbands from Kay and Ann?"

"Not for the boaters," said her mother.

"There's Ann's boater-as-was," argued Ginty.

"Oh, Ginty, do stop being tiresome. _You_ were the one who wanted Ann's boater when she left, and you were the one who reduced it to its present state."

"I couldn't help that it blew off whilst I was walking along the coast road, could I? People aren't supposed to come down there on motorbikes. It was just terrifically bad luck,"

"You could have been more careful."

Nicola opened the door into the sitting-room. Ginty, in jeans and an outsized rugby shirt that Nicola supposed belonged to this month's boyfriend, looked consciously airy and unconcerned. Their mother, in about-to-go-and-sit-on-a-Committee tweeds, looked quite the reverse. The box from the school outfitters stood between them, a half-unpacked, sodden cardboard Exhibit A. Exhibit B, Nicola supposed, was Lawrie in the hiccuping aftermath of floods, sitting hunched in the windowseat wrapped up toga-fashion in the curtain. "_Blimey_," she said respectfully. "Don't tell me they've sent us four gross of name-tapes all embroidered _Marrow_ in lovely cursive again?"

"No, thankfully enough, and that reminds me, Ginty, if you could see to _your_ name-tapes before you leave..."

Ginty crimsoned. "But it's so babyish. And it's not like they get mixed up in other peoples' laundry like they did at school."

At another time, Nicola would have ventured a mild tease, and asked, _not even Alec's_, but Ginty looked likely to flare up at the slightest spark, and besides, she didn't really want to be reminded of Ginty's success with Alec at present. Or John, or either of the Jameses, or Timothy, or Marcus.

"They go in with everyone else's washing at home, and it makes trouble for Mrs Bertie."

"Mrs Bertie doesn't have to..."

"And, as you'd know if you gave it a moment of thought, it isn't convenient for you to be running loads of your own washing every five minutes. There's only so much water in the boiler..."

"It's not _fair_," burst out Lawrie, grabbing the moment with a particularly dolorous hiccup.

"_What_ isn't?"

"Oh - Nicola." Her mother turned to her, as if only now realising that the room contained three daughters instead of two. "I was planning - I thought we could go to that place in Colebridge, like we did for Ann, once Ann _told_ us - it really is more sensible this way..."

Nicola turned her mind to possible errands that Ann might have carried out in Colebridge and came up a perfect blank. "To get the piano-stool re-covered?"

"The piano stool?" said Mrs Marlow with Karen-like disconcertment. "What? It can't need re-covering _again_. Don't tell me one of you has spilt ink on it?"

"We're not _ten_," said Lawrie.

"Looking at you, Lawrie, I do sometimes wonder." Mrs Marlow turned from one twin to the other. "I had the letter from Miss Keith this morning. It was mostly about changes to the official games kit from next term - they're doing an official tracksuit, which I do think makes sense -"

"More work for the school outfitters," said Ginty impishly.

"...yes, I daresay... Oh, it'll be easier if you read it for yourself."

Nicola scanned the lines of Miss Keith's dashing angular handwriting. Joy rose inside her, joy everlasting, blurring her eyes until she could barely make out the words and had to shove the letter back into her mother's hands. "_Games Captain_?"

"And Lawrie won't dry up about how it's not fair and she's not even a prefect," said Ginty with feather-light malice, judging that their mother's irritation with _her_ would probably pass more quickly if she dropped another sister in it. "I've told her she ought to think of the rest of the world. Now that you'll have a lovely red hatband, to go _so_ well with your lovely blushing complexion, and a tie-pin besides, no one's going to mistake you for each other any more. And if you get hit over the back of the head and forget who you are, you can look at yourself in a mirror and be reminded."

A younger Nicola would have said something ferocious along the lines of _if anyone's going to be hit over the back of the head it's you_. As it was, she merely smiled crimsonly, said something incoherent to her beaming mother along the lines that no, she didn't specially want to get dressed up and go to the Stag and Hounds in Colebridge, and if fish and chips were the only thing that would cheer Lawrie up (as Lawrie was insisting they were) then fish and chips it should be.

After that, still fumble-footed with happiness, she spent the afternoon banging out tunes by ear on the piano, and was rather surprised, when congratulated by the remainder of the family at supper, to realise that she hadn't been thinking about Patrick at all.


	2. A Change Of Dormitory

Ginty Marlow, taking advantage of the excuse of dropping her little sisters off at school to go about various car-enabled errands in Wade Abbas, was surprised and displeased to find the school gates locked. True, locked they generally were, except at times when cars dropping off day-girls might reasonably be expected, but on First Day they were generally thrown open to the world. "Don't tell me it's next week after all," she said, pulling up irritably in a shower of gravel, and winding down the window as a figure in peaked cap and flapping coat hurried over from a rather new, sentrybox-like structure to interrogate her.

"Of course it isn't. Look at all those infant hordes," said Nicola, pointing at various small figures clad in scarlet or in more or less improbable home clothes, moving sedately behind conversing, First-Day-manners parents and staff, or rushing about the place under their own recognisance.

The figure arrived at the window, took off its peaked cap, and proved itself to be the ancient groundsman. "Three of you, is it, missie?" he enquired of Ginty. "You ought to have a permit for that car, if it's staying."

"It's not. I'm just dropping my sisters off," said Ginty hastily, turning on the charm. "Oh - really - you need to look them up on a list? Nicola and Lawrence Marlow - yes - Lawrence - Lower VI, yes, both of them, yes, twins..."

The groundsman parried with a heavy-handed pleasantry about what a pity it was that there weren't two of Ginty as well, and opened the gates with an electric screech.

"I wonder what that palaver was all about?" said Lawrie, bouncing up and down in the back seat. "D'you think we've got the daughter of a Texas oil baron or an Arab princess or something?"

No one could give her an answer. Ginty swung the car to a halt in the drive and hustled her sisters and their impedimenta out as efficiently as possible, superstitiously fearful of meeting a staff and having to give an account of the summer she had spent working at a stables near Dublin (which had been nothing like she had anticipated) or a rational plan for how she intended to spend her time at Oxford. Nicola helped heave suitcases; Lawrie struck a pose leaning against the car and scanned the horizon for signs of Tim Keith.

"And goodbye and good luck and have a good term to you, too, Gin," said Nicola to the rear lights of the retreating car as it roared off down the drive. She looked up at the flat-faced, cream-coloured frontage of Kingscote, liking it perversely better now that the schooldays in front of her no longer seemed everlasting... two years, six terms, so many cricket matches, so many of netball... Even the new buildings at the back, white and modern against the starched blue sky, looked surprisingly and pleasantly familiar now they had been given a summer to weather; and, no matter how furious Nicola had been about it at the time, the fourth best net and the field behind it _had_ been fairly useless for cricket, and the new Pavilion on the other side of the pitch _was_ pretty fab and made a much better show when teams came visiting, however one might feel for the old one, buried under dormitories and an expanded Language Lab...

"Have you got my Health Stiff?" demanded Lawrie, appearing at her elbow with a bag of assorted impedimenta under one arm and an ancient suitcase under the other, and leaving the heavy lifting to Nicola.

Nicola had. They ventured into the shadowed hall, always unfamiliar when approached from the generally forbidden front door. One got a much better view of the pictures on the walls and the rather fabulous carved wooden ceiling, Nicola thought; and realised that she was now Sixth and might - within reason - go to and fro as she pleased. The whole place looked uncannily clean but smelled of fish pie. Nicola thought commiseratingly that one really would expect the staff-and-stragglers who hung around over the summer to get something better, considering how few of them there were to be catered for. Blinking out the greenness of vision that came from going from sunlight to shade, she approached the table which was normally used for putting out the post, and found the cheerful, youngish school secretary, Mrs Clements, seated behind it taking Health Certificates.

Nicola wasn't sure what to make of Mrs Clements - she often had to hunt through several drawers before finding a stamp, and had a tendency to tell one, in a tone of amused desperation, about the dreadful things her five- and two-year-old children had done, whilst she was looking - but, on the whole, even if she wasn't the much-missed, retired Miss Carter, at least she wasn't the Lambert. Tim had always reckoned that it was _because_ of the Lambert that Miss Keith had chosen to hire a secretary who came in every morning on a sit-up-and-beg bicycle and went away on the same at six, and Nicola, who suspected Tim's tales of Behind The Scenes With Miss Keith on principle, still thought she might have a point.

"Nicola, and Lawrence." Mrs Clements beamed at them. "Nicola, Miss Craven wants to see you at your earliest convenience - " Nicola blinked, wondering whether that meant _before_ unpacking or after, and honestly, being in the Sixth should come with a dictionary - " - and there is a Prefects Meeting at seven o'clock in the Division Room. Miss Keith will want to see you, but she's running late with her appointments, so it won't be until this evening. No dog this term?"

"No dog," said Nicola, though there hadn't been a dog since Daks had departed with Esther in such awful finality, and that was before Mrs Clements' time.

"No - dog," said Mrs Clements, triumphantly finding a biro.

"Oh, good, there you are," said Miranda West, coming down the stairs with a distinct air of ownership and an armful of books. It was a settled thing at Kingscote, though no one was very sure _why_, that the lower orders carried satchels, the Fourths made do with various bags from home (though plastic carrier bags and anything with a particularly garish design tended to be confiscated by the staff), the Fifths carried attache cases and the Sixth carried piles of notes and folders unadorned. Perhaps, Nicola thought, it was something to do with being emancipated from exercise books, though actually that seemed to happen around Upper Fifth...

From the doorway behind the Mail Table, at the same moment, came Miss Boyd, the science mistress; short, squared-off, no-nonsense, with a humorous bulldog face and greying dark hair. "Ah, Lawrence. Just the person. Wait here, please."

Lawrie paused, spring-legged, on her way to the notice board. "But I was just about to go and look at the dormitory lists, Miss Boyd."

"No need to look, I'll tell you for nothing. Thirty-seven, on the second floor of the New Block. Nice and handy for your form-room," said Miss Boyd bluffly. "Come _along_, Daisy, keep up."

In much the same way that Miss Boyd was wont to produce examples of an alkaline earth metal or an exothermic reaction, she now produced an example of a new girl. The new girl looked about fourteen. She had wispy, dandelionish pale brown hair, a very new scarlet uniform, and an expression of profound alarm. Miss Boyd patted her briskly on the shoulder, which only made the look of alarm deepen. "Daisy, this is Lawrence, who is in the Sixth Form, and in the same dormitory as you. Lawrence, take Daisy along to 37 and show her where to find her trunk and how to put her things away, and then take her down to New Girls' Tea. I have it on very good authority that there is saffron cake."

"What does one wear to a Prefects Meeting, do you think?" asked Miranda, ushering Nicola away. "Will this do?"

Nicola, looking respectfully at Miranda's obviously very designer shift, thought it probably would. She was not surprised in the least to hear that Miranda was also a prefect and had already had her interview with Miss Keith. "That terribly superior type Louise Wheeler is Head Girl. I suppose if one _has_ to pick one of this year's Uppers, it might as well be someone with a _little_ backbone. Olwen Kirby does nothing but mutter in corners and Rachel Wilmot's never _here_."

"But if they were going to pick a terribly superior type, you thought it might have been you, p'raps?" teased Nicola.

"I'm not a superior type," protested Miranda, stricken. "At least - am I?"

"No, of course not. You are a clot. Who else are prefects from our lot?"

"We're all one big, happy form together now. If you'd had your interview with Miss Keith, you'd _know_ that," said Miranda, as one kindly imparting information. "There aren't many from Lower Sixth. There never are. Just us, and Elaine Rees. She's Librarian."

"_Elaine_? Not Sally?"

"Sally's left."

"Well, still, why not Jean - oh, she's left too, hasn't she? Why not Maggie Sutton? Not that I don't _like_ Elaine, but - " Still exclaiming mildly about this as they ascended the stairs, they passed Miss Cromwell, who startled them both by greeting them with a stately nod.

Close on Miss Cromwell's heels - but not, by some infant luck, actually colliding with her - came a covey of Seconds arguing in shrill upset voices about whether these were the stairs they were allowed to use, and whether this was the way to the book cupboard and what to do if it was not. Feeling a little like Ginty's Catkin when a troop of lost ducklings got into his stable, Nicola left Miranda to deal with it, which she did with efficiency.

The Seconds having been turned around and sent back about their infant way, thanking them both several times over each, Nicola breathed again. "I suppose I'm going to have to take practices for those," she said wonderingly. "I'm going to have to tell them _apart_." The attractive child with the neat cornrow braids would be easy enough to pick out, she supposed, unless she blossomed overnight into an Afro, and so would the one with all the freckles, but the rest - plaits, ponytails, braces and all - looked as utterly interchangeable as the eighteen plastic pigs who rather perplexingly formed part of the cargo of Phoebe Dodd's wooden Noah's Ark.

"It'll be much easier once they've got netball kit on. You can just address them as Centre or Goal Attack or whatever," said Miranda consolingly, taking Nicola's arm and towing her up to the second landing. Miranda put her books down tidily on the windowsill; took Nicola's tie, pin and all, and examined it in the light from the tall high window, finally tucking it back into place with a satisfied sigh. "_Good_. I did think it was terribly foolish of Keith, leaving you out, all those years. I suppose Craven must have talked her round. And Lawrie, too." Miranda would have added, _fancy anyone thinking her of high enough moral character to be put in charge of a new girl_; but despite being an only child herself, Miranda was a clear-eyed observer of what went on in larger families, and had long since come to the conclusion that as far as anyone else's siblings and their failings went, it was best to say nothing at all. "I hope that Daisy child is interested in Shakespeare."

"Or the Christmas Play. At least - _is_ there going to be one this year? Supposing we don't all get sent home early because of a commotion over the drains like last year, I mean?"

"I _did_ hear that Kempe was quietly pleased about the break with tradition, after the Minster year and the Carol Concert," said Miranda, impish, boosting herself up into the window-seat. A party of Upper VA went by; Jenny Cardigan, newly tall, with copper-coloured hair that swung half-way to her waist, said "H'lo, Nicola. H'lo, Miranda," but showed no sign of wishing to stay.

Miranda yawned, stretched and returned to her muttons. "And you can't deny it was a feeble effort the year we were Lower Five. Louise Wheeler reminded me of nothing more than Craven making herself heard across a crowded pitch, Terry Hunt blushed so hard it looked as if she was doubling up Joseph and the Star of Bethlehem, and Helen Bagshaw was inaudible. Which reminds me, have you heard about _her_? Helen Shaw, I suppose I should say?"

"What, has she got a stepfather or something?" asked Nicola, not thinking it terribly newsworthy if she had. She had never given any particular thought to Helen, a tallish, fairish, quietish component of the B form to whichever A form Nicola herself was currently occupying; in fact, if someone had put her on the spot and demanded three facts about Helen, win the grand prize or go home empty-handed, she would have come up with 'reasonable enough wicket-keeper' and then, more doubtfully, a vague idea that Helen was interested in ice-skating; and beyond that nothing.

Before Miranda could reply, Lawrie came stumbling down the stairs, arms dumbly windmilling, her face as it swung out of the stairwell's dark filled with an abundance of doom. Nicola caught her and installed her on the windowsill. "Whatever's the matter? And where's that new girl you're supposed to be looking after? I can't see Boyd being terribly happy if you leave her to wander off on her own to fall in the lake or..."

"... eat the Headmistress's pears," finished Tim Keith impishly, strolling up with her hands in the pockets of a pair of trousers that _just_, by virtue of a side zip, managed to escape being classed as the forbidden jeans. "_Haven't_ you got public-spirited now you're a prefect, Miss Marlow my love! We shall all have to mind our P's and Q's now."

Even after all this time, the mention of the pears was enough to make Nicola feel discomposed; though, as she told herself staunchly, if... if it hadn't happened... she wouldn't have known what kind of a person Tim was. Not that she disliked Tim, precisely - at least, she didn't think she did - but things between them were still more uncomfortable than not. "Your hair's different again," she said in a way that she hoped was at least passably friendly.

"Responsible _and_ observant. I can't think why they threw you out of the Guides." Tim produced a bag of caramels and offered them around, matily, with a flick of a glance under her spiky dark lashes at Nicola as if expecting retaliation. She bounced up onto the window-ledge beside Lawrie. "What's the matter?"

"Nick's got her own do-ormitory," wailed Lawrie. "And I thought... I thought now I was the last one left and they couldn't put me in a sisters' room all on my own, I was certain to be in the same one as you -"

"Oh, honestly - "

Nicola and Miranda exchanged glances, both of them minding rather more that the other was present at this display than at witnessing it themselves. They decided, by mutual agreement, to go back down to the notice board in the Division Room and see where Nicola's dormitory actually was; and, as Miranda said, dusting off her joke from earlier with the rather over-amused and adult air that always seemed to cling about her at the beginnings of terms until she had worked off some of the patina of her home-self, whether there was a dress code for Prefects Meetings.

"Everyone wears sheets. I thought you knew," said Nicola, noticing with a small proud pleasure that the mass of Thirds and Fourths pullulating about the notice-board got out of their august, sixth-formerly way, and with a slightly larger spurt of irritation that two girls from Upper VB did not. Her eye caught by the form lists, she turned to those before seeing who was in her dormitory. It wasn't _likely_ that Lawrie had been relegated to another year in Upper VA on top of everything else, but if she had been, it would be handy to _know_.

Several unfamiliar names caught her eye at once, scattered across the lists for Senior School. "W. Chen - J. Frost - M. Prentiss - V. du Toit - Miranda, who _are_ all these people?"

"Some little school out by Port Wade closed down - Wade House, I think it was called - and Miss Keith got the backwash."

A younger Nicola might have said 'How _lucky_ for Miss Keith' in exaggerated tones, and made a face at Miranda; now, she realised that the flotsam and jetsam of Wade House might be standing right behind her, and it would do to be tactful. "I hope they learned to play netball," she said instead. "So what _about_ Helen Bagshaw?"

Behind them in the panelled room, the Thirds and Fourths continued to point, comment and condole noisily with each other. _All_ of them appeared to have been landed in a form completely unexpected, containing all of their enemies and none of their friends, and were descanting severally on the woes of having to write to their parents and explain that they were in a B form and receive a lecture on _not working_ and possible removal to the local comprehensive, or, alternatively, that they were now As and would be expected to produce academic miracles.

"You mean you don't know?" said Anna Fitzpatrick of Upper VB bumptiously. "Gosh, do you live in the wilds of Scotland or something?"

One of the Thirds set up an affronted and patriotic defence of Scotland until quelled by a look from Miranda. The other VBite reached into her attache case and produced a copy of _Vogue_, which was as definitely contraband as Tim's caramels; Nicola wondered whether she should do something about it, and decided, hardily, _not her business_, and particularly not on First Day. The VBite riffled pages and pointed triumphantly to a picture. Nicola peered. It was an advertisement for some kind of face product, as allegedly patronised by a pale young woman with sleeked-back, ruthlessly well-cut hair and sophisticated eyes. Nicola looked, and thought, unwarily, _she looks a bit like Jan_. "Well?" she began.

Her eye skidded to one of the smaller, inset pictures, in which the young woman was holding up a dab of the product to her face and smiling in rather well-rehearsed rapture. She had seen that face before. Here, at this very notice board, four years before, in front of the list of possibles for _The Tempest_, when she was in Lower Four.

The young woman in the magazine looked at least twenty. It couldn't be.

But it was. It was Helen Bagshaw.

"Well, I never," said Nicola inadequately. She handed the Vogue back. "And if that isn't in the pile to be donated to the hospice by the end of the week, it's not my look-out," she added in what she hoped was a sufficiently matey yet prefectly tone.

"She's all over London," said Anna enthusiastically. "I thought for certain she wouldn't come back for sixth form. But she must have done, or they wouldn't have the gates shut against the paparazzi. I hear Keith's going to talk about it in First Assembly. _And_ no one's going to be allowed shopping without a staff, even if they are Sixth."

"We'll see," said Miranda briskly. "Oh, lor, what a dormitory I've got. I must say, I think whatever method Keith has for working out dormitories, it's utterly cracked."

Nicola looked for her own allotted dormitory, and found a small crackle of pleasure at reading, _Prefect, N. Marlow_. "Bonnie Newberry - I thought she'd left - two Thirds and all the rest Lower Fifths. It'd be much more sensible, really, if everyone was with people their own age, and they could put all the lights out at once."

"But think of never being able to get away from your own form's feeble rows," said Miranda, surveying the Thirds and Fourths _de haut en bas_ as they milled around at the back of the room. "I say, we haven't been up to the roof yet."

Nicola agreed that they had not, and that it was a pity to break the tradition now. Leaning against each other for support after the climb up the fire escape, they looked out over the small landscape of pitched roofs and chimney-pots to the larger one of the grounds beyond. "I'm glad they haven't shut it off," said Miranda. "I was afraid they might, for fear of paparazzi dropping in by parachute in search of Helen Bagwash. Did Lawrie actually _say_ what she'd done about that new child she was in charge of?"

"I expect the poor brat had been called in to see Keith, or else she was at New Girls' Tea," said Nicola hardily. "And even if she isn't, I'm not running after her. It'll be confusing enough for her without Lal and me popping up and down like the Comedy of Errors. Thank goodness it's only for First Day."

"Oh, _good_," said Miranda with satisfaction. "I was wondering whether you'd think it was your business. I suppose we _should_ make sure Tim doesn't harass the poor brat..."

"She can't do that much between now and the end of New Girls' Tea, surely?" said Nicola hastily.

There was a small movement behind them. Nicola looked round. There was another girl on the roof.

Nicola did not recognise the sweep of brown hair bent rather forbiddingly over a book at first. She supposed it might be one of the girls from that school at Port Wade; and then, with rather more social worry, that it might be Helen Bagshaw. Whoever she was, she looked - _poised_ \- and poise was, Nicola thought rather dazedly, presumably one of the things that had won Helen a modelling contract. "Hi - " she began.

The girl pushed the brown flop of hair out of her face. That looked poised as well.

"Hi, Nicola," said Esther Frewen almost inaudibly. "Hi, Miranda."


	3. A Change Of Play

"That's very good, everyone. Hurry in and change. We don't want anyone getting cold. Yes, Joanna, I am fully aware that you have a temporary dispensation to use the Senior changing rooms because of the problem with the showers." Miss Redmond smiled, showing all her teeth, at the helpful Joanna, who hurried after the remainder of Lower IVA, a flock of scarlet starlings fleeing away towards the new building. "Nicola - may I have a word with you, please?"

_A word_ turned out to be a thoroughly unpleasant ten minutes; and Nicola, seeing that she still had half an hour left before the beginning of double Chemistry, decided to walk back the long way around past the elm trees and work off her irritation that way. The gist of Miss Redmond's remarks had been that Nicola must be less abrasive with the Fourths - _softly, softly_, as she had put it, and caused Nicola to drop the words into her own mental waste-paper basket forever - and that however successful her methods might have been with her own form, she must adapt them when she was coaching juniors.

Which, Nicola thought, crossly kicking leaves, was quite unfair. She'd simply assumed that it was worth coaching everybody, not just the faces she had already seen two Wednesdays running at the junior netball team trials; and that even the rabbits would probably enjoy the game more if they had some idea what to do if the ball came their way. _Craven_ hadn't said anything when Nicola had been coaching the Possibles.

But then, she thought as she rounded an elm tree, rubbing her hand against its bark for a small measure of luck, that was Craven and this was Redmond. The thought pulled her up, in a rustle of grass about her legs. But Redmond _couldn't_ \- surely - still be holding a grudge over Guides, could she? It was _cracked_. For a start, even if Nicola _had_ gone back to Guides way back when, she'd have left by now, since Miss Keith didn't approve of Rangers...

A pair of legs extended themselves out of the tree; wriggled, dropped, and revealed themselves to belong to a child in a scarlet beret with a bright blue crest, Junior pattern. It looked up at her from under the beret and a wispy fringe of brown hair. "Hi, Lawrie. Can I - can I carry those netball bibs for you, or something?"

"I'm Nicola," said Nicola, bemused by this apparition, and hoping belatedly that she hadn't been accompanying her thoughts by making faces. "Lawrie's twin. Are you supposed to be out here?"

"I don't like netball. Not the way you play it here," said the child simply, falling into step beside her. She had a slight accent, but Nicola couldn't pin down where it was from.

Nicola remembered the form list - Anne-Marie Higgins, Fiona Lance, _Daisy Lewis_ \- and the crowd of faces around her, and one of the faces assuring her that Daisy Lewis had gone to the San with earache. She barely recognised the alarmed-looking child from First Day in this self-possessed if somewhat untidy object. "It's not _the way we play it here_. It's the way it's played."

"It's much faster at home. And we've got womens' basketball as well. I don't know why we aren't allowed to play that here."

"Because there isn't a basketball court, I shouldn't wonder. Where's home?" Nicola asked neutrally.

"New Zealand. _We_ start out with Fun Ferns when we're five or so. I don't want to stand about while you show all those other new people how to do passes. I was only watching because I thought you were Lawrie."

"Were you indeed," said Nicola with kindly ferocity, feeling that it was her duty to be kind to new girls, but also to sit hard on anything that approached cheek. "Whatever's Fun Ferns?"

"Oh, it's just for children," said Daisy kindly. "What sort of bands does Lawrie like, do you know?"

"Bands?" said Nicola blankly, imagining some item of antipodean netball kit.

"Bands," said Daisy patiently, a small cultural ambassador explaining the ways of the young to the impossibly elderly Lower Sixth. "You know, music?"

_Redmond_, Nicola thought resentfully, would probably expect her to pat the child on the head and give her a sweetie. Miss Cromwell would quell her with a look. Val Longstreet would have read her a long lecture on the dignity of the Sixth, and horrible Lois would undoubtedly have turned on the charm and then turned it off again, quick as a flash, when things didn't go the way she expected. "You can't just bunk off practices whenever you like," she said, handing over the bundle of netball vests. Daisy took them resignedly, as a relic touched at least at second hand by the presence of Lawrie. "They don't just give you lines, you know. You'll get hauled off to an educational psychologist, and _then_ \- who's your form mistress?"

"Miss Cartwright."

Nicola could have wished for someone more alarming. She did her best. "Miss Cartwright will tell you off for wasting _her_ time as well as mine and Miss Redmond's, and I can tell you, they rate the educational psychologist a lot higher around here than they rate me. Did you pretend to have an earache, or did whoever it was who covered for you know about it?"

"Pretended," said Daisy, looking cowed.

Nicola was unsure whether the cowed look was real or put on, particularly considering the child's admiration for Lawrie. "Well, the next time Miss Cartwright talks to Matron, very likely she'll ask after your earache and then there will be _blood for breakfast_," she said with Cromwellian ferocity, and was gratified to see the child look taken aback at that. Honestly - what an _infant_ \- how long did it usually take, she wondered, for the Fourths to work out that the staff compared notes? "Think about that the next time you make excuses. Now. Do the Fourths still have a Free Period before tea?"

Round-eyed, Daisy nodded.

"Then you come out to the netball courts and show me what you can do. And don't even think about not bothering to come, or hiding up a tree to see if Lawrie shows up too."

"_Might_ she?" asked Daisy, looking up under the fringe.

"I very much doubt it. Do you know where those are supposed to go?"

Daisy, given instructions as to the home of the netball bibs, scudded off over the short-cropped grass. Nicola followed at a more leisurely pace, torn between annoyance and amusement. If that was a sample of the Fourths, and Redmond thought they needed the kid-glove treatment, then Redmond was _bonkers_, and that was all there was to it. For that matter, she didn't recall having been that fragile a flower when _she_ was in Lower IVA...

For some reason, that train of thought led to how odd it was to be sitting in classes - _tutor groups_, Nicola corrected herself, as her feet hurried themselves up the broad marble steps - with former B's like Erica Shelland and Daphne Morris; and, parallel strand, how strange the lack of such former fixtures as Jean, dashingly and quite astonishingly accepted into the newly coeducational sixth-form of her father's old school, or Berenice, conquering a sixth-form college in Wade, or Meg Hopkins, at Cambridge two years early with her vile father, or Rosemary Wright, who had just _left._

And then there was Helen, pale, tall and thoroughly unforthcoming, who floated through school and Outside Activities alike without a word for anyone, though she had unbent far enough to say quite two sentences to Miranda once about the next term's cricket; and Esther; and Nicola's thoughts shied away from Esther. The business after the Carol Concert in the year they were Upper Fourth hung over them both, grim revenant; and whilst Nicola realised that Esther couldn't be expected to find the right words to say about it, it wasn't as if she could think of any herself, either. It was almost as if the part of her that thought about Esther had stayed fourteen whilst the rest of her grew up.

If Esther could be said to have a friend, it was Barbara Wateridge, with whom she shared tuition for the Advanced Paper in French. It wasn't as if Nicola _minded_ that. She liked Barby, and Esther could have fallen into much worse clutches, particularly some of the imports from the school at Port Wade, who still all moved together as one mass and were inclined to make up to both Esther and Helen but not to think much of the old guard. But still, Nicola couldn't help noticing that in the common room in the evenings, Barby generally turned on Radio One and wrote long screeds to her boyfriend, whereas Esther - as far as could be ascertained - was nowhere at all.

Nicola arrived back in the Sixth's airy form-room only moments before Tim, who had been drafted in as Miss Kempe's second-in-command for this year's Christmas Offering. Tim sat down on Miss Boyd's desk and waved a script enticingly. "Silence, you 'orrible little lot."

"What have we got?" demanded Olwen Kirby, a solid young woman whose voice always sounded as if she thought herself hard-done-by, even when she was just asking a civil question. "Is it the Christmas Play again, or carols?"

"The good news," said Tim carefully, "is that we're back in the Theatre. No trying to sling the lighting round the wings of fifteenth-century gargoyles, and no doing most of the rehearsals on a stage that's the wrong shape with completely different acoustics. Miss Kempe has seen fit to inform me that there's to be nothing too draughty in the way of costumes, as everything backstage will be out of bounds except to hand-stamped members of the Crew, and you'll all be changing over by the swimming pool..."

"It's because of the fire risks," Louise Wheeler informed her. "You remember how people were changing under the stage last year? We're not allowed to do that any more."

"What a thing it is to be Head Girl," said Tim, in a voice that _sounded_ admiring. Louise evidently decided to take it as so. Olwen, who had a voice, and was hoping for carols, subsided into disgruntlement.

"I told you back in Lower V, I'm not doing the Shepherd Boy and you can't make me," said Lawrie from the far end of one of the laboratory benches at the back. "I've already done him once and there's only one way you _can_."

"It's not the Christmas Play. It's not as bad as it _could_ be," said Tim judiciously. "I mean, it's not classical plays in the original Latin or anything, which is in many ways a shame, as I'm sure everyone would love to see Louise and the rest of us classics lot weeny-weedy-weakying all over the place. Nor - sorry, Barby and Esther - is it Racine..."

The Sixth, wondering what on earth could prompt such a comparison, made encouraging go-on noises or remained silent, depending on temperament. Helen Bagshaw propped chin on hand and stared out of the window at the drive. A man was hanging about beside a brown car outside the gates. The groundsman went to speak to him; Nicola, astonished, wondered whether it had been a journalist, and decided, no, it must have just been someone asking directions, and Helen looked round the room in bland, dreamlike astonishment that anyone else was there at all.

"Go _on_, Tim," said somebody. "Or shall we do guesses?"

"Is it a fashion show?" asked a fluffy blonde Port Wade girl called Melissa.

"What an imagination," said Tim almost fondly. "It's a... a holy musical, I suppose. Like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, sort of."

"Bags me a brother who stands at the back and doesn't do much," said Erica Shelland, who hadn't been listening.

"_Like_, I said. It's called _Make Me A World_ and it goes all the way from Adam and Eve to Moses, and there's songs in it," said Tim, getting the worst behind her. "There's lots of room for the little ones to be Noah's Ark creatures and Chorus and so on, and angels called Angy and Gabby and Lofty and so on, and Lawrie's going to be Lucifer. _Better to reign in Hell_, and so on, except that the dialogue's hardly Milton, so don't get your hopes up. And," she said, turning wheedlingly to Nicola, "I thought it might be rather good if you played Olly."

"_Oily_?" said Nicola, thinking she must have misheard.

"Olly. That's what they call God in it, _don't_ ask me why. Sort of like doubling up Oberon and Theseus, and Titania and Hippolyta. It doesn't take much acting," said Tim with devastating frankness. "So you'll be quite all right there."

"And I suppose Kempe gave _you_ a free hand with the casting?" retaliated Nicola hardily. Though it might, she thought, be all right - it was bliss to be acting, and if Lawrie had a part she wanted too, perhaps it would be just like the Prince and the Pauper rather than any of the more fraught theatrical productions since.

"Well, no. But I do get to go along and have my say at all the meetings. _Just_ like you and the netball team," said Tim, kindly bringing things down to a level that Nicola might understand.

"It sounds like EastEnders, with Angie and Lofty," said one of the Port Wade girls, and giggled. They were forever going on about television; one of them had said that they had televisions in their _bedrooms_ at their old school, though Nicola for one didn't believe it.

Nicola looked at Tim, expecting her to be squashing; but Tim merely hugged one long knee and said in a quite reasonable tone of voice, "That's not a _bad_ way to think about it. The last thing we want is people being very self-consciously holy and the second last thing is self-conscious stageyness. I'm not having any angels bashing each other around the ear with saucepans or staging showdowns in the pub - " there was a ripple of laughter, "but if we can aim for an - an _immediacy_ -"

"I bet they'll want Lou to play God," said somebody. "I mean, it's _like_ being Joseph..."

"I know several stepfathers who would disagree - " Tim was beginning when Miss Boyd came in. Tim removed herself from the desk. Nicola got her books and papers responsibly ready. Esther, two seats away down the bench, looked as if she might say something, and then looked as if she might not. Miranda looked as if she were wondering whether this might be something she would be permitted to be part of, and reserving judgment until she'd seen the script.

There were a long string of notices, mostly concerned with Musical Appreciation moving from five p.m in one music room to six p.m in the other, and with the school dentist, who would be visiting the next week. Nicola thought she might get away without paying attention. She rearranged her papers and thought about the Play.

Of course, it probably was the sort of holy pop that Patrick abominated, but just because _Patrick_ loathed something was no reason for Nicola to scorn it without giving it a try (_particularly_, Nicola found herself bruisedly thinking, if Patrick was going to become a monk). If Lawrie was to have a major part, then surely it couldn't be all that musical; or all that embarrassingly with-it, either, if Kempe and Keith had passed it. She hoped Lawrie liked her part, it would make things much easier. And, talking of Lawrie, wasn't it _incredible_ that the Daisy child should have decided to be cracked on her? Still, perhaps Lawrie's likely presence on the First Seniors once the teams were settled would make the child stick at netball. Supposing it hadn't all been a Tim-like put-on by one small infant rabbit. Nicola's thoughts drifted away to teams, leaving the Play to take care of itself.

Those of the Sixth who were taking Chemistry stayed, rearranging themselves gently around the desks so as to avoid misbehaving gas taps or the wonky seat beside the sink. The rest, including Tim, Lawrie and Esther as well as Miranda, took themselves off to Classics or Business Studies or a free period, depending. Meena Patel of Upper VA, who had a dispensation to begin certain A-levels early, came in and asked Pomona whether it was all right to sit next to her, even though Pomona had never said anything but yes.

If nothing else, Nicola thought, returning to the Play in her head by cautious steps, not wanting to jinx the luck, it would be fun to write to Ann and inform her that one was playing God. It was certainly one-up on Mary and Gabriel. All in all, the Play might be more enjoyable this year than she had anticipated.

She supposed it balanced out, because being Games Captain was _not_ all joy after all. Even leaving aside Redmond and cheeky antipodean juniors, there were still the lists of Probables and Possibles for senior netball to be pinned up that evening, with all the bad feeling to which _that_ might lead. In particular, she supposed she _ought_ to talk to Olwen, who had been dropped from the Possibles favour of a spoilt giggling creature from the school at Port Wade by the name of Jodie Frost, who made Nicola's teeth itch with irritation but had proved to be a very handy Wing Attack.

None of it was anything like she had expected. But then, thought Nicola with an air of making one of the great discoveries of the universe, nothing ever was.


	4. In The Copper Kettle

"Do you know who that is?" asked Miranda dramatically, pointing at a scattered clutch of figures in infant-pattern denim skirts and scarlet jumpers, self-important with clipboards and worksheets, who were busying themselves about the front lawn industriously surveying the lawns and measuring the trees.

"Why would I? I'm not Junior Side prefect," said Nicola, taking her boater off and letting the small October wind catch her hair. They were on their way to the Copper Kettle in Wade Abbas, a privilege that had been granted to them, as it was to each year's Sixth, with a good deal of solemnity and several dire warnings about what would happen if their standard of work was to slip. "That's Ray Wilmot's lookout and she's welcome to it. All of _my_ dormitory are safely old enough to toddle to the loo in the night without any hand-holding required from me."

"I do wish you could say the same for mine. Aileen James is practically _senile_. You'd think Keith would tip them out when they turn nineteen, retakes or no retakes, for fear of looking like a Magdalen Laundry. Look. _There_, at the end, the one with the ponytail. _That_," said Miranda, "is Rhiannon Arthur, whose mother was Head Girl when I was in the kindergarten."

"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair," said Nicola, deeply impressed. "I suppose in another few years Val Longstreet's young will be galumphing across the quad. What a thought."

"_Does_ she have young?"

"I don't know, I don't go round reading the _News Of Old Girls_ page, any more than you do."

"Well, I do," Miranda admitted as they crunched their way satisfyingly down the gravelled drive. "Just sometimes. To see if there's anything about what Jan's been up to."

"If you don't mind me saying," said Nicola with a quick shy smile for the now-familiar figure in the gatehouse, "I should think Jan's about the last person, ever, to bother sending in her life story to the school magazine."

"I know," said Miranda, looking at herself with detached approbation in the plate-glass windows of the new large shop that had opened at the end of the long road that led up to the school. "But I still look."

Even after two weeks of being in the Sixth and allowed to come and go with what felt like cavalier abandon, there was still a giddy pleasure in walking past buildings that were nothing to do with school, and passing people who knew nothing about Kingscote and cared less. Nicola looked about, as interestedly as if she had just disembarked in a strange port.

As recently as last year the streets near the school had been full of rather drab large houses divided up into flats, and the occasional rather dreary-looking private hotel. Now they were blossoming out into fashionable small shops and smart new apartment buildings with rather nautical-looking balconies, and a tall new backpackers' hostel. Nicola found herself charmed by the thought of Kingscote, founded in the early years of the century at a safe and maidenly distance from Wade and all its distractions, finding itself caught up by the tide and clutching its skirts about itself in horror. She explained some of it to Miranda, but it fell rather flat, and they strolled on in silence towards the Copper Kettle.

The Copper Kettle, with its warm buttery fug of steam and chintz curtains and shopperish conversation, had become more or less a colonial outpost of Kingscote's sixth form. Partly this was a tribute to their Special Chocolate Cake, partly the continuing prudent aftershocks of the row that had erupted the previous year when Shirley Russel and Vivienne Worth had been found eating chips in an inferior establishment with two boys from the Tech, and partly simple force of habit.

This morning, with two Free Periods on each others heels followed by forty-five minutes for lunch, had produced a particularly rich crop. Three of the Port Wade girls had commandeered the coveted table in the front window and were doing each other's hair. Barbara Wateridge, Linda Stratton and Stella Afford were gathered in a booth at the back, where Berenice Anderson was holding court in tight black jeans, sloppy black sweater, a new geometric haircut and purple lipstick, none of which would have passed muster for an instant back at Kingscote. Finally, Pomona Todd was sitting at a long polished table which she had almost entirely covered in Geography notes, writing an essay in her quick large rounded hand, and occasionally saying 'M-hm?' at somewhat random intervals whilst Louise Wheeler related a long indignant story about insubordination on a Saturday Shopping trip.

Their hellos to Berenice said, Nicola and Miranda declined Stella's enthusiastic offer to move up on the irregular wooden bench and her lavish description of the six inches at most of available cushion as '_miles_ of room.' "It's quite all right, we'll go and bother Pippin and Louise. Nice to see you, Berenice. Good luck."

"Go and turf that stuck-up lot out of the table by the window," suggested Stella, not normally a malicious young woman. "You're prefects and they're not."

"And I'm sure that'll hold water the moment Keith buys up the lease on the Copper Kettle," said Nicola swiftly. "Don't be so feeble. What have they done to get _your_ goat?"

Stella, Linda and to a lesser extent Barby all had much to say on this topic; so much, indeed, that Berenice, bored, extricated herself spider-legged over the back of the booth and went to the loo, pausing on the way back to talk loudly about the facilities at her sixth-form college to the mostly unresponsive Pomona.

"They're all horrible," said Linda indignantly. "Well, I don't mind the Winnie one, I suppose. She does Community Service at the Recreation Centre playgroup, same as me, and she seems quite reasonable when she's on her own - I mean, she was nattering on to some woman in Cantonese and I was washing up, I didn't _talk_ to her or anything. But as for the rest of them, Jodie and Melissa and that Victorine person from Upper VA... Listerine, _I_ call her."

"Victorine's not here, is she? The Upper Fifth aren't supposed to go coffee-shopping," said Nicola, grateful for something that sounded like an actual misdemeanour rather than the Wade House girls' usual catalogue of unclassifiable annoyances, which included but were not limited to cultivating an expression of offended boredom, walking everywhere very slowly in twos and threes with linked arms, and using incomprehensible slang which one of their number had picked up during her childhood in Hong Kong.

Linda tore up one of the sugar-packets with her fingers. "No, she's not, but she's in my bedroom, and her friends are _always_ visiting and I never get a moment's peace. Olwen does her best to squash them, I suppose, and they're always nice as pie when she's _around_ -"

"Except that this pie isn't very nice," said Barby, poking her torte discontentedly with a fork. "And I broke my diet for it and everything."

" - in their smug smirky way, but as soon as she goes out of the room they sing 'Olwen, Olwen, Olwen' - I think it's to a TV tune -"

"Yes, it is, it's _Rawhide_," supplied Barby, whose father liked cowboy series.

" - and fall over laughing. If I hear any of them singing and laughing one more time I'll _slap_ them, and then maybe Crommie will send me off to sleep in the San and I'll get some peace and quiet," said Linda viciously. "_And_ I'm sure someone's been going through my drawers. Ugh."

"Some of them do Folk and they're _foul_," said Stella loudly. Two lady shoppers of the grey-hair-and-tapestry-bag genus at the next table looked round with amused, interested faces. "Always telling us off for pointing our toes and saying that they don't suppose anything's moved on around here since Playford."

"You needn't tell the whole world about that," said Miranda swiftly. "Going through drawers is another matter. Has anything gone missing?"

Linda looked conscious. "Well - no - nothing valuable -"

"She had a record token," said Stella. "I know you'll say she should have handed it in to Oranges-and-Lemons -"

"I wouldn't say anything so footling."

" - but it was a present from this boy who likes her. A friend of Barby's bloke."

"Drop both of us in it, won't you," said Barby, turning the colour of the Copper Kettle's famous damson jam. "Look, all I did was send Jamie a _photo_ of me and Linda. It's not my fault his friend O'Donnell's an idiot. And it was only for two pounds fifty, anyhow."

"It was _her_ two pounds fifty _and_ her card," said Stella aggressively.

"I don't begin to see how you tell anyone about that," said Nicola finally. "I mean, they'll be down on Linda just as much as Victorine and her little pals, probably more so, and you as well, Barby."

Barby ate a corner of her torte, looking as if this thought had already occurred to her. In the window seat, the Port Wade girls were trying on Alice bands that one of them had brought in a bag, and looking particularly pleased with themselves. Nicola's stomach turned over with dislike.

"I tell you what you could do," said Berenice, returning. "Now that you're Games Captain. Can't you leave them out of teams? I bet they're no good anyway, not if they come from a poxy little dame-school."

"Of course I can't," said Nicola sharply. "And you wouldn't be suggesting it if you were still around to take the heat for it and not off sixth-form-colleging."

Berenice looked affronted. "What you mean is, never mind if they _are_ all a lot of sneak-thieves, as long as they can swim or play tennis."

"It isn't even the term for tennis," retorted Nicola, and realised that this was what her father always referred to as arguing the wrong point.

"You can't let them walk all over you," Berenice persisted.

"Neither them nor you," said Nicola flatly. "We'd better sit down somewhere, Miranda, or they'll think we're not going to order at all."

Stella, who had been stretching out one small coffee over an hour's worth of chat, looked conscious; Linda looked ruffled and irate, and Barby kept looking from Nicola to Berenice as if she wished none of it had happened. Miranda caught the tolerant eye of the waitress and smiled as she followed Nicola over to Pippin's table. Pomona cleared away some of the outlying reaches of her notes and gave them a slow-baked smile. Miranda hung her coat over the back of a chair. "You're right. I don't see _what_ we do about it."

"Do about what?" asked Louise, hospitably pushing over a plate of cakes. "Help us finish these, do."

"They had a three-for-two special and then we found we could barely manage one," said Pippin.

"Only because you would have hot buttered toast as well," said the Head Girl, head-girlishly. "Honestly, isn't Bernadette a _sight_?"

"Berenice," Nicola corrected her crumbily around the edge of a chocolate florentine. "I bet if Crommie or Fergus saw her they'd _still_ tear her off a strip, and never mind that she's left."

Supplied with a new audience, Louise returned to the subject of the irritations of shepherding a Saturday Shopping trip. "Honestly, you wait until you come up in the rota, then you'll see. And it only gets worse in the lead-up to Christmas."

"Isn't that something to look forward to?" said Miranda sympathetically, letting her Greek encroach on some of the space already occupied by Pomona's Geography, which ought, Nicola thought, to produce some kind of Latimer-pleasing region infested with nymphs and satyrs.

Louise looked at her watch. "Oh, _botheration!_"

"Botheration?"

"I'm supposed to be picking up one of the Thirds from the station and putting her in a taxi. The poor scrap was parcelled off to South Wales at goodness knows what hour of yesterday morning to go to her grandmother's funeral, and she's expected back today, and the Ussher apparently thinks she might still be in the throes of grief and liable to throw herself under a bus."

"Oh, has the Ussher got the Thirds this year?" yawned Pomona. "Miranda, do take a look at this river-basin. It's a most peculiar shape."

Nicola's conscience pricked her like a scratchy raffia seat. "If it's Bethan Craddock, she's one of my dormy babies. I'll go, Lou, if you like - we haven't ordered and you've still got half your hot chocolate to drink."

"_Would_ you? Thank you. I haven't even started on this wretched editorial," said Louise gratefully. Nicola, remembering belatedly that part of the Head Girl's duties encompassed producing the school magazine, got up rather hastily before she was asked for a contribution.

"Aren't you the community-spirited one," said Miranda admiringly, accompanying Nicola to the door. "I'm sure I'm the last thing any of my dormitory would want to see standing on a platform welcoming them back."

"I suppose it's that my dormy babies are something I can _do_ something about," said Nicola frankly. "Not like Linda and those Port Wade horrors."

"Linda is a drip," said Miranda firmly, "and if Olwen wanted any help squashing Victorine she'd _ask_."

Nicola hesitated, Lawrie-like, on the doorstep. "I'm not sure I would, in her shoes. I mean, it seems so _feeble_ not to be able to manage your own dormitory."

"Then probably she _is_ managing it, yes? Off you go." Miranda opened the door, commissionaire-fashion; Nicola found herself out in the crisp autumn cold, buttoning her coat. It occurred to her that she hadn't asked Louise what time the train was coming in, and she had better get along to the station.

Wade Abbas Station, with its green-painted ironwork and hanging-baskets, was unexpectedly engaging without hordes of school cluttering it up. Nicola, who instinctively liked and trusted station-masters, enquired as to the train, and was told that she wanted the eleven twenty-five Cardiff to London, platform two.

Another person was waiting, nervous as the wind-twitching paper sandwich-bag which some past traveller had left behind, on platform two. Nicola's eyes skipped over her at first, writing off the height and the very adult camel-coloured shoes and coat as _just another grown-up_; but a gust of wind came up the platform and tugged at the coat, revealing - unmistakeably - a size eight or so long-fit iteration of Kingscote's scarlet uniform skirt.

One person in Upper VA, two in Upper VB, were tall enough, and might have owned that swept-up chignon of hair, but Sara Beverley and Krista Sommers were both among Miss Keith's trial-run guinea-pigs for a course in Car Maintenance and Nicola couldn't see either of them missing it, and Sophie Luke had a broken wrist in a fluorescent yellow cast, which made it a near certainty that this was someone from the Sixth. Nicola was turning to greet her, thinking, sensibly, that it must be Helen off to London to see her agency (though the last time _that_ had happened Miss Cromwell had gone with her as a chaperone, to, Nicola surmised, the deep embarrassment of everybody) when the girl turned round.

"I'll explain when I get back." said Esther, looking anguished. "I _promise_, Nick."

The train came in with a loud whistle. Bethan Craddock alighted, looking, Nicola thought, as if she'd been _boil-washed_, but transparently delighted to see Nicola rather than an unfamiliar prefect, and to be cushioned against even the small alarms of handing over her ticket and finding the right taxi; and Esther whisked onboard and shut the door behind her.


	5. Assorted Conversations

"Well, we can return to the Second Seniors in a moment," said Miss Craven, studying the notes propped on her corduroy-skirted knee with detached disfavour. "I think we've argued the merits of Bonnie versus Victorine quite enough for the moment. Let's make a start on the Juniors. Nicola, you've been taking a lot of practices with them."

Nicola nodded. She rather liked Miss Craven's room, with its warm fire and overstuffed armchairs and high sash-window looking out onto evening gloom and clashing branches, and the brightly patterned Turkish carpet; though she could, on the whole, do without the equally Turkish coffee, and also without Miss Redmond, ensconced toothily in the opposite chair. Nicola was looking forward to next term and lacs and hockey, even if it would mean the very bracing presence of Miss Ferguson instead.

"I think Joanna should stay Centre and Captain," she said, settling on something that surely there couldn't be any disagreement about. "She's very keen."

"So is Anne-Marie," said Miss Redmond neutrally.

"I think Anne-Marie for Centre too," agreed Miss Craven. "I'd like to see Joanna somewhere she can be stretched. She was playing Goal Attack in that scratch game against Lower VA, and the difference was astonishing."

"They did very well, didn't they?" said Miss Redmond, indulgent, surprised. "Particularly since Lower VA has Bunty."

"Yes, indeed." Miss Craven made a note on her pad. "I think Joanna should certainly remain Captain, though. Unless either of you have other ideas?"

Despite herself, fighting all the way, telling herself fiercely not to be such a _drip_, Nicola remembered another Junior Netball team. There seemed to be a loud buzzing obstruction in her ears. She reached down and poked the fire rather than meet the rather-too-casual gaze of either mistress, and let them thrash out the question of Wing Attack and Wing Defence between them. The buzzing, much to Nicola's relief, receded.

"Now, as for Goal Shooter - " began Miss Craven, pen poised at the ready.

"Daisy Lewis is very good," said Nicola.

"I should think so too, after all the tuition you've been giving her. Do you think it's quite fair?" asked Miss Redmond in a nudging tone of voice.

Nicola faced her. "Yes, I do. She's lonely and homesick, and apparently she's adored netball since she was quite a small child. If it can be something that reminds her of home _and_ something that settles her at Kingscote, I think that's worth taking a bit of effort over."

"I wonder whether the rest of Lower IVA feel similarly."

"I couldn't say," said Nicola, with a feeling that she and Miss Redmond had crossed swords - or, in Nicola's case, naval sabres - and were now circling each other again, waiting for a weakness.

"Hmmm," said Miss Craven. "The question is whether she's likely to become overconfident. We don't normally expect new girls..."

"Esther Frewen was on the team in her first term," said Nicola quite neutrally.

It seemed to be the right thing to say. Miss Craven looked thoughtfully at the fireback. "Yes, true, that was a similar case... Very well, I think we'll try Daisy out at Goal Shooter, but you must impress upon her that she can't become slack or lazy, or go about expecting any special treatment because of it."

"No, Miss Craven," said Nicola properly, and hid a smile in her coffee cup.

"Now, _about_ the Second Seniors," said Miss Craven a little later. "Jodie's a certainty, of course. She's quite a find. I think we should see her moving up to the First team as soon as she's found her feet. What the team needs is a really _strong_ Centre..."

Miss Redmond coughed. "What about Renée White? I know the H.M. felt her conduct last year put her _quite_ beyond the pale -"

"She was very lucky not to be given a Conduct Mark," said Miss Craven forthrightly, causing Miss Redmond to look at Nicola as if wondering whether a nannyish lecture on confidentiality, or, for that matter, Conduct Marks, was required. Evidently it was not. "I think I'd like to see her stay out of trouble for rather longer than this before I make a decision on whether she's a suitable person to represent the school. Jodie - Linda - Meena - Meena needs to be watched, of course, to make sure she's keeping up with the pressure of school work. Nicola, how would you say Meena is coping?"

"Oh, very well," said Nicola quickly.

Miss Craven nodded and made a neat quick mark beside Meena's name on her pad. "And now, I suppose, we come to Bonnie and Victorine. Redmond, you've seen them both play..."

"Victorine's the faster player," offered Miss Redmond, causing Nicola to wonder quite spitefully whether Victorine had a light hand with pastry or an astonishing knack for boiling sprouts. She thought she _had_ heard the foul creature talking about how she planned to get a job catering for a directors' dining room, though, to be fair, that might have been Melissa, or one of the others.

Miss Craven nodded. "I think so, too, and Miss Keith's keen to integrate the girls from Wade House as soon as possible. Though Victorine's in her O-level year, and Bonnie's a strong player too. I'm surprised she's never made colours."

"She only played in half the matches last season, if you remember, because it took her so long to recover from that bout of glandular fever."

Miss Craven's pen doodled undecided, angular shapes on the yellowish paper. "I suppose if we move Bonnie over to Wing Defence and bump Linda down to Sub..."

"Hard on Linda."

"No, I disagree," said Miss Craven, suddenly all sharp angles of canted-forward shoulders and neat, athletic body within the confines of the chair. "It seems to me that this year she's got thoroughly _slack_. When I think of how she used to play for the Juniors, I wonder what's gone wrong."

"A simple case of adolescent silliness, I should imagine," said Miss Redmond with a snap in her voice. Nicola felt the sick buzzing feeling again. She wondered whether it was the coffee, or whether perhaps she should ask if they should have the window open. Could she - was she going to mention Linda and Victorine and the record token?

Blessedly, miraculously, Miss Craven went to open the window of her own accord. "Quite a fug in here," she said, and lit a cigarette.

By the time the pother of finding a cigarette for Miss Redmond and exclaiming over a lack of matches had subsided, Nicola was feeling quite normal again. Of _course_ she wasn't going to mention the record token, it had nothing whatever to do with the Second Senior team, and as for trying to do Victorine down by some other underhanded method, even _Berenice_ wouldn't have suggested that and _meant_ it. "I wouldn't call Linda silly," she said, striving for a tone of adult detachment. "I think it's more that she's a bit overwhelmed by the change from O's to A's. She always seems to be slogging away. She's given up on that aerobics thing that some of the B's used to do on Wednesday nights, and she really enjoyed that."

"All the more reason she should get out in the fresh air and play netball," said Miss Craven, pen hovering in undecided circles. "You see how useful it is to have a school's-eye view of these things, Redmond?"

Miss Redmond made noncommital noises. "Well, if not Bonnie and not Linda, who _are_ we supposed to jettison for Victorine? There seem to be quite a lot of girls all about the same standard."

"There always are," said Miss Craven. "I'll have a word with Matron. If Bonnie's health is still precarious, it might be better if she were Sub."

"If Bonnie's health is that much of a concern, I imagine Matron will have everything to say about her being carted about the countryside in a cold minibus without even getting a healthy run about at the end of it."

Various names were suggested; rejected; and at the end of it the mantle of substitute for the Second Seniors fell upon Melissa, whose putative disappointment Nicola thought she could bear quite easily.

To her surprise, Miss Craven bore her company back down the stairs and across the shadowy, chessboard-patterned Hall. Nicola made courteous conversation, which Miss Craven turned briskly around to the subject of careers. "I see you're going in for maths and science. Medicine?"

_Gosh no_, thought Nicola, medicine never having fitted in any way with her image of herself. "I don't think I could bear having to work for days on end with no sleep as a junior doctor. And I don't - I mean, sorry - but I don't _like_ having to talk to sick people."

"I'm told the usual way around that is to become a surgeon." Miss Craven said with some amusement. "So my father tells me."

_What a bizarre conversation_, Nicola thought dazedly. "Is he a doctor, Miss Craven?"

"He and both my brothers."

"Mine are in the Navy. Father and both brothers, I mean..."

"Ah, yes, I remember meeting the Captain last Speech Day. So, after a few weeks' insight into my job, do you think you could do it?"

Nicola blinked; as bombshells went, this one was practically a Spearfish torpedo. "I'm not really sure I like girls that much either, Miss Craven."

Miss Craven laughed and went away up the Staff staircase; though Nicola, breaking into a run as she headed towards the school office; she wanted to catch Mrs Clements before she left, to ask her to type up the lists, but one couldn't run when in company with a Staff. Though, thinking about it, if she wanted to try it out, a games mistress would be the one to try it out on.

She found Mrs Clements struggling into a ratty Fair Isle jumper against the cold of the ride home and turning out the electric lights. "First thing tomorrow," she promised Nicola airily. Nicola went politely with her to the steps and waved her off as the red light of the bicycle wavered away down the drive.

She stood there between the school's warmth and the night's cold, looking out between the stuccoed pillars into the dark. The bicycle's lights were replaced by a car's headlights, sweeping twin cold Hollywood-silver spotlights across the cold gravel in the dark. Someone got out, paid the taxi, thanked the driver. Nicola, expecting a staff, thought that she had probably better stand here and hold the door for them, even if it had turned suddenly too cold for comfort; and then saw that it was Esther. She felt an immense and rather surprised relief; going by Esther's previous form, there had been every possibility that she wouldn't come back at all.

"Honestly," Nicola said with the frankness that had somehow been quite out of reach earlier, as Esther, coat bundled over arm, hurried herself up the steps, "only you would run away by _taxi_. And in high-heeled shoes."

"I went - I said I'd tell you - " said Esther to the shoes.

The familiar small irritation with Esther's tentativeness came back, and with it a memory of Esther calling her _Nick_ at the station, and a large, general feeling that of _course_ Esther was a friend, albeit one who was prone to the most extraordinary ideas. "Honestly, you don't have to tell me," said Nicola. "It's none of my business."

"No. I mean... I want to. I went to London," Esther explained matter-of-factly, as if taking a day in London on a whim was something that all Kingscote's seniors did, every blessed time it occurred to them. "To see Laurence."

"Sorry, I don't - you mean a _boy_? From the Lycée you used to be at or something? Did he come over on a ferry or something? You know, Esther," Nicola said, her thoughts sea-chilled by the memories of another boy crossing the Channel three years before, and feeling approximately a thousand years older than those members of the Sixth not weighed down by the responsibility of a scarlet hatband, "his parents are probably _frantic_."

Improbably, Esther giggled. "_No_. Laurence is my little step-sister. Véronique's daughter."

"If you don't mind me saying so, I thought your stepmother was called Sheila."

"Oh, no, Sheila's married to someone called Jake now. We send Christmas cards." Esther's tone very firmly disposed of Sheila. "What I mean is, I remember what it was like going to the Lycée and having everyone talking the wrong language around me. I felt absolutely despairing, and I was _fifteen_, and I knew it was only for two or three years. Laurence is _nine_ and it's _forever_. She kept writing me the most heart-rending letters..."

"Honestly, you could have got yourself _booted_," said Nicola, still dumbfoundedly holding the door. "Why didn't you _say_ something?"

"Because if I said I had a sister called Laurence too... not that Lawrie spells it that way, I don't mean, you might have thought... I don't know, that it was _encroaching_..."

"You are quite, quite mad," said Nicola, shaking her head.

"Enjoying the night air, Esther, Nicola?" enquired a crisp voice that could only belong to Miss Cromwell, upright in academic gown over tweeds, returning from her evening constitutional. "No wonder Miss Keith is forever lecturing us about the heating bill. Leaving aside the question of whether you require sectioning under the Mental Health Act for the moment, Esther, why are you wearing those ridiculous shoes?"

Nicola Marlow, Games Captain, prefect, and responsible pillar of the school, considered the likely consequences of Miss Cromwell learning that Esther had beetled off to London; remembered Giles' motto concerning mutton and mint sauce, and lied boldly. "Her feet got wet, Miss Cromwell."

"That," said Miss Cromwell mordantly, "is neither an excuse nor an explanation. Kindly answer the question you understand to have been put to you. Why, given that Esther's feet were wet, did she choose to bedeck them in a pair of shoes that I must assume took a wrong turn on the way to some charitable collection and found themselves in the Acting Cupboard?"

The wind blew in through the door - _cripes_, it was cold, though Miss Cromwell's calm, interested gaze had roughly the same effect as a very focused blowtorch. Esther surprised Nicola thoroughly by speaking up for herself to the extent of an apology and something that seemed to be about the difficulty of finding shoes in a size nine and a half.

"That," said Miss Cromwell with a glance down at her own neat brogues, "is the first thing you have said this evening, Esther, which I would class as in any way likely. However, given the choice between standing here in a draught getting to the bottom of it and catching the beginning of _Sherlock Holmes_ on the radio in the Staff Room, I think I must choose the bard of Baker Street. If the radio in the Sixth Form common room is available, I advise you to do likewise. It might provide a lesson in logic and clarity." She looked at Esther's feet. Esther shuffled. "Well, now that your feet _are_ wet, they must also be cold, since I very much doubt that those heels are compatible with the school linoleum. If you catch pneumonia you may direct Matron's wrath upon me. Good night to you both."

She swept off towards the staff staircase. Esther, obediently, began taking her shoes off. Nicola shut the heavy, slightly mothball-smelling door. "_Whoo_," she said, smiling at Esther. "I thought we'd both had it for sure that time. Imagine, six years worth of school fees only to get expelled in the Sixth. My parents wouldn't be a bit pleased."

"Nor would mine," said Esther seriously; and then, catching that it was a joke, "You mean Lawrie could get expelled and they wouldn't mind?"

"Oh, yes, _Lawrie_ could." Nicola slipped her hand matily into Esther's arm. She thought she might risk a tease. "Betcha it'd be _much_ worse for you, you having so many more parents than other people. How many is it now?"

"I count George," said Esther firmly, as they crossed the slippery marble floor at a pace part-way between a trot and a slither. "I don't count Sheila, and Jake's quite out of the question. I might _come_ to count Véronique, I think..."

Nicola, aware that this was an area in which she, for once, did not have much expertise, listened respectfully all the way up to the Sixth Form common room.

\--

Nicola had vaguely expected rehearsals for the Play to have begun by this stage of the term. She regarded the part of Olly as hers and a settled thing; not, she hastily amended, out of swank, but simply because everyone knew that Tim was the original irrestistible force _and_ immovable object, and Kempe didn't have a prayer. She was, therefore, slightly surprised to open the door of the common-room and find that along with Rachel Wilmot working conscientiously at a table and Elaine Rees, apparently asleep, it contained Tim, slumped in the ancient rose-patterned sofa frowning over a much-annotated cast list.

Tim looked up and gave a theatrical groan. "How was Craven?" she enquired, one sufferer to another.

"Oh - fine -" said Nicola, who had been braced for something more along the lines of _so have you finished your potty little team lists, then?_ Pleasantly surprised, she sat down in the middle of the sofa, leaving Esther to perch at the end. She rather feared Tim's comments on their reunion, but Tim's mind was clearly on a plane above anything so banal.

"Honestly, it's _hopeless_," Tim said. "I'm supposed to find room for a _representative sample_ of the Wade House lot, and the moment any of them step onto a stage they put on these weird over-elocuted voices. Ray says she's never heard anything like it."

"Can they dance instead?" suggested Esther shyly. "Pomona says their folk is good."

"How very bucolic of Pomona."

"_No_ \- I mean - her mother folk-dances - "

"I _know_," said Tim darkly, breaking the tip of her pencil.

" - and Pomona does in the holidays, but not here, because her mother doesn't rate Ussher's mad folk woman."

"I suppose they could come in and prance during the Creation," said Tim. "At least the stage will be unlit for quite a lot of it. And I've to find Helen a part, because Miss Keith doesn't want there to be a big huha about her being left out, though I personally think it would have to be the very silly season indeed before anyone cared."

"I suppose you're not supposed to put her in fig-leaves and a body stocking either, then," said Nicola sympathetically.

"I can't cast her as Eve, anyway, because her voice is all wrong for that drippy ballad Eve's got," said Tim, for once not seeing the joke. "It's bad enough that Lawrie's supposed to have a song, though I think I've persuaded Craven that if the Chorus are there singing away in full view whilst she mimes into a microphone it'll all be quite clever and post-modern."

The door swung open. Four of the Port Wade girls made their determined way over to the sofa, arm in arm as usual, but with expressions of belligerent bravado substituted for their usual vacant displeasure.

"You shouldn't really be here - " began Rachel uncertainly from the table where she was working. "If you want someone, you're supposed to ask at the door for them."

"I'm Sixth and so's Melissa. Victorine and Jodie are our guests," said the one who Nicola thought was called Winnie. "We're here to see Nicola."

"Well, you're in the right place," said Tim with a yawn. "Here she is in all her glory. Stand up, Nicola, and take a bow."

"We're here to say that we're not going to be in any of your rotten teams," said Jodie forcefully, and tossed her crimped blonde ponytail.

Nicola resisted the cheap satisfaction of saying that Winnie wasn't on any of them in the first place and Melissa was only a substitute. Her heart began to beat faster with annoyance and distaste. "I'm sure Miss Craven won't have any trouble replacing you. What shall I tell her? Pressure of work?"

"You can tell her that the people from the _poxy little dame-school_ have decided not to play for you. _We_ heard that tart from the Tech."

"Does this apply to all extra-curricular activities?" enquired Tim winningly. "Because it'll make life much easier for me. Though I _was_ planning to cast you as Cherubim, Melissa. You get a _song_. Would you think, looking at her, Nicola, that she could sing?"

Nicola, uneasily aware that Tim's malice was two-edged, made no reply. "If you were there," she said steadily to Winnie, who appeared to be the most reasonable of the batch even if she _was_ the source of the irritating slang, "you'd have heard Miranda and me squash Berenice pretty hard for saying that. But she's not - either of those things you said."

"If she's not a tart, why does she dress like one?" said Jodie with another ponytail-toss and a giggle.

_If you're not a flaming, copper-bottomed, four-star idiot, why do you act like one?_ thought Nicola. Jodie crimsoned as if she had heard her thoughts.

"If _I_ were you," said Tim, juggling one slipper gently back and forth across her own bare feet, "I'd have waited until you got your team ties and girdles before throwing them back in the Games Captain's face. But then you might not have been good enough to get onto the teams after all, and wouldn't _that_ have been a shame?"

"The lists haven't gone up yet," said Nicola. "I'll give you until tomorrow to think it over. And now get back to your own common room, you two Upper Fifth people, before I have to take official notice that you're here."

Victorine and Jodie didn't like the tone of that _official_; they took leave of Melissa and Winnie at the door, with a lot of very affected hand-pressing, sidelong looks and pseudo-Chinese slang.

"And don't come back," said Tim loudly as they left, in a run-along-little-children tone of voice. She lowered her voice and turned, friendly and confidential, to Nicola. "You know what I'd do, if _I_ were Games Captain?"

"I expect you're going to tell me."

"I'd get Victorine on her own and let her know that I knew all about the record token, and let her talk the rest of them round from there."

"I couldn't do that," said Nicola finally, deciding not to get into the question of how Tim had known about the record token, the answer probably being Lawrie, who was in Victorine and Linda's bedroom.

Tim regarded her, sidelong, under her sleek new haircut. "Couldn't you? I could. _Shall_ I?"

Before Nicola could answer, the door opened again. Rachel's fountain-pen sputtered; Elaine woke up; but it was only Lawrie, come to perch on the end of the sofa and demand to know the latest revisions to the cast list for the Play, and to wave a copy of _Dr Faustus_ which she had found in the library and demand that come the summer term Tim should produce that.

"We'll see," said Tim indulgently. "One tragedy at a time, n'est-ce-pas?"

She returned to contemplating the cast list. Lawrie leaned over, occasionally exclaiming "Who's Moses?" or "_She's_ not my idea of an angel," whilst Esther fell prey to terrible suspicions that she might be asked to act, or, worse, to sing, and hugged a cushion for silent comfort.

"And am I Olly?" Nicola found herself able to enquire, in quite a normal tone of voice.

"Oh, yes." Tim eyed her almost affectionately, and said, with neat and creamy malice, "All you need to do is pretend to be God. You shouldn't find that too difficult, should you?"

"Oh, get along with you," said Nicola with equal not-quite-fondness. "I say, Esther, you'd better get your slippers. And how on earth did you sneak those shoes out of your trunk and past Matron in the first place?"

The Sixth solemnly looked at Esther's feet, much to Esther's embarrassment. She tucked one foot behind the other. "They're Helen's. I borrowed them."

"Did you have to take out insurance?" said someone enviously.

"I wish you'd be nicer to Helen," said Esther with surprising energy. The Sixth, taken aback, looked at her instead of the shoes; Esther, taken aback to an almost equal and opposite effect herself, looked earnestly at Tim and Nicola, and almost coincidentally over their shoulder at Daphne, who said fumblingly that Helen thought she was better than other people.

"She doesn't. She's _shy_."

"You can't be shy and be all over billboards and things," argued Daphne.

"Oh, that's just woolly thinking," said Tim, unexpectedly taking Esther's side. "You might as well say Lawrie can't be scared of anything because she was a Musketeer in last year's Play."

"One for all and all for me," said Lawrie complacently, and then, nearly falling off the arm of the sofa and into Tim's lap, "What?"

"Anyway," said Kara Fletcher, who had arrived in Lower VA the term after Esther left, "if you think Helen's so great, Esther, I don't know why _you_ don't talk to her more."

There was a silence while this dropped to the floor and everyone who knew Esther looked at it kindly and wondered who else was going to sweep it up.

"I don't know - I mean, _sorry_, but I don't know why Helen isn't starring in this Play of yours instead of Nicky and Lawrie," said Melissa, strolling over from the other end of the room, where she and Barby and some of the others had been listening to a phone-in show on the radio. She caught Nicola's eye and looked affronted. "_What?_ All I meant was, it's her _career_ \- and she's really pretty - so's Esther, for that matter, I don't know why she isn't an angel or something."

"Thanks for the flowers all round," said Nicola, getting up. "And now, if no one else is going to, _I'll_ get Esther's slippers, and return these shoes to - "

"Helen of Troy," said Lawrie dreamily.

She was only thinking, as it happened, of Christopher Marlowe. But it was no use. The name stuck.


	6. Floodlights and Thunderstorms

The Wade House delegation, having got no joy from Nicola, presented themselves to Miss Craven instead. No one outside the staff-room witnessed the result, but its repercussions included a Saturday morning assembly in which Miss Keith laid down the law from on high to the appalled (and, in Miranda's case, somewhat exhilarated, as by a walk into an uphill wind) masses concerning letting the school down, unwillingness to take risks, and general rudeness on both sides, and the folly of taking sides at all.

"When you get out into the world of work," said Miss Keith, leaning balefully over her lectern, "you will be expected to pull shoulder to shoulder with people of all backgrounds and beliefs, and, very probably, with people whom you dislike personally for one reason or another. If you are unable to do so, you will find yourself unfitted for many of the places in which you could be of the most use to yourself and others, _and_ you will lose the respect of those whose opinion you value most. Kindly remember that all of us here - even I myself, when I took over from Miss Dobson-Brown - were once newcomers ourselves."

Miss Keith gave her very best closed-mouthed smile and looked up at the large portrait of Miss Dobson-Brown that hung on the wall opposite, beside the gilt-painted roll of Head Girls. "I trust you will take these words away and think about them. That is all, except for a few notices."

The notices, to the rage and indignation of the Sixth, included a considerably more stringent attitude to the Signing Out Book which had to be signed when leaving to go into town or to the beach; and a blanket ban on visits to the Copper Kettle, except on Shopping Saturday or in the company of a member of staff.

"Thanks a bunch, Wade House," said Linda energetically. "And the foul thing is, they're gated too, so we won't be able to go up to the roof or out to the beach without falling over them."

"No one goes to the beach this term anyway," said Olwen heavily.

"_Unwilling to take risks_," fumed Bonnie. "I'll tell you what's a risk, having anything to do with them, you might catch something."

"Honestly, are you _twelve_?" said Nicola scathingly, and opened the door to the common-room, where she found Lawrie tranquilly playing Scrabble with herself and cheating horribly.

Nicola stood over her with folded arms and shook her head. "Didn't you _go_ to the assembly?"

"No, I think it's all tripe, and I wanted to finish reading _Dr Faustus_," said Lawrie, stealing one of the blanks neatly out of the middle of an earlier word to make _axolotl_ on a triple word score. "Tim, have you _asked_ Kempe whether I can have a pointy beard? And then I can have a little King Tut one for the Egyptian bit, and come on doing _this_, like Steve Martin."

She bounced to her feet, brought one arm up in front of her face, hand stiffly bent as if it held a sock-puppet, turned the other arm out behind her, and then rotated from the hips so that her top half was facing to one side. So, somehow, were her feet. Nicola looked bemused. "What are you, a little teapot?"

"_No._ Watch." Lawrie sidled across the floor Pharaoh-fashion in what almost seemed like stop-motion, humming something to herself that might, given Lawrie's voice, have been anything from _Colonel Bogey_ to _Last Christmas_ but was evidently intended to be Egyptian in theme. Bonnie giggled admiringly, and even Olwen said "That's rather good."

"And if I moonwalk," said Lawrie out of the side of her mouth, "I can do it _backwards_..."

"Don't get too complicated," said Tim, leaning back against the bookcase and watching Lawrie with proprietary pleasure.

"_Or_," said Lawrie enthusiastically, twisting herself back into three-dimensionality, "I could come on as a _mummy_. In bandages. Isn't it _handy_ there's all those sets of pyramids and things left over from _Antony and Cleopatra_? And do you think the Ussher would notice if we got the Choir to hum _Walk Like An Egyptian_?"

"Don't push your luck," said Tim. "I see where you're going with the costumes, though. If Nick and all her angels are in the same robes all the way through, but down below everything changes - I bet I could get it past Kempe, if I went along armed with a lot of guff about the great chain of being and the music of the spheres."

"There's a book by the Narnia man about it in the Library," said Elaine helpfully, flopping into an armchair.

Nicola, glad that _she_ wasn't expected to be a quick-change artist, left them to it. She retired to the bookshelf by the window, shaking her head and thinking cross loud thoughts about _infantile_ twin sisters, and then to more sensible thoughts concerning the manifest sense of sitting down and getting her calculus prep done before early lunch and the Farringdon match.

\--

It was traditional at early lunch before matches for the teams to sit together, with all the First and Second Seniors promoted to the Sixth table and all the juniors clumped together behind them on the table usually occupied by Upper VB. Nicola looked up and down the row, liking the symmetry of herself, Jenny, Miranda, Esther, Kara, Lawrie, and Anna, all in plain blue ties, and then Linda, Bonnie, Meena, three Upper Fifths and Bunty Penfold of Lower VA, in girdles striped pale and dark blue. At the end sat the subs, both together, making rather stilted conversation; Renée White might have made valiant attempts to turn over a new leaf, but she and Olwen still regarded each other much in the light of poacher and gamekeeper.

Behind them, the juniors, resplendent in girdles of plain blue, were making rather more junior noise than usual. Nicola gave Joanna a look, which only seemed to mute the excitement rather than smother it.

Nicola was less pleased by the lunch itself, a chilly meal consisting of soup, cold meat salad, and gooseberry fool, none of them, Nicola thought, particularly appetising on an October day with a sky that promised thunder. She said so to Jenny, who remarked consolingly that at least there would be an Away Tea put on by Farringdon College. "And it'll be miles better than anything they put on for the Farringdon girls usually," she added, licking the slimy back of her spoon. "I mean, ours always are when we have matches here. And on Parents' Days."

The junior clamour rose again. Nicola tapped spoon against glass. "Look, what goes on?" she demanded. "If it's just a new pass or something, fair enough, but _keep it down_. If it's anything else, I strongly suggest you give it up. None of you are what I'd call _natural_ conspirators."

Dead silence greeted this remark. Then Daisy Lewis hopped down from her chair and produced a crushed-looking but creditably large bunch of flowers from her lap. With Anne-Marie shyly following her, she marched over to the startled Lawrie and presented her with the flowers. "It's from us both. For luck."

Lawrie, who had practiced receiving flowers many times in front of the mirror, nevertheless took these with about the same grace with which she would have received a pile of muddy hockey boots. She looked rather wildly at the bud vase on Miss Keith's table, which contained a plastic crocus. Nothing else in the room looked even vaguely suitable; the only candidates were a very large bronzework urn under one of the windows and a fire-bucket.

Nicola despaired. Honestly, the things juniors came up with. All it needed was for Miss Craven to stroll in, whistle round neck, and witness this debacle.

"Well, if you have to waste your pocket money, I suppose there's worse causes," she said. She considered the rest of the Junior team, who looked variously conscious, disapproving and in Joanna's case, guilty. "Mariamne," she said, picking one of the disapproving ones. "Take those flowers up to the sixth form common room and ask for a vase. They can go on the big table, I suppose, unless anyone there's got a better idea. And don't hang about making suggestions, I don't want to have to send someone to round you up when the coach comes."

Joanna, who _would_ have taken the opportunity to make suggestions and to report gleefully back to her cronies on the Sixth's taste in decor, looked guiltier still. Mariamne, who loathed being conspicuous for any reason, reluctantly took the flowers and hot-footed it out.

"Honestly," said Nicola to Lawrie, sitting down again. "What do you do to encourage them?"

"Me? I don't do anything."

"Maybe that's what attracts them," suggested Miranda pleasantly. "Like a blank canvas, you know. Shall I pour coffee?"

\--

The Farringdon courts were very new, and had _floodlights_, at which the Juniors were intensely impressed and kept nudging each other and pointing. The Seniors were more impressed with the purpose-built sixth-form block, which was alleged to have its own cafeteria _and_ its own shop. The Juniors were to play first, _because_, as Joanna whispered impressively to Nicola, the Farringdon juniors went to bed bizarrely early, even on Saturdays.

Nicola thought how like medieval fiefdoms all schools were, all of them with their own landmarks and laws and rituals. "Get along with you and call the toss," she told Joanna with a nod to the Farringdon games mistress who was waiting on the court. "And remember to shake hands afterwards."

The Junior team won their game by twenty-three goals to ten and were so overwhelmed by their victory that they behaved impeccably throughout tea in the long Farringdon hall, which was perplexingly decorated with large abstract pictures. And then the tables were being cleared away, and it was out again into the sharpening cold for the two Senior matches.

The sky was low and heaped with thundery clouds. Miss Craven flipped a coin. The Farringdon Centre, a tall wiry person with hair scraped up onto the top of her head into an _enormous_ plaited bun, called and won. The Senior team ran out and took their places, shivering a little in the small wind whipped up from the stand of dark trees beyond. Only Jenny was blessed with the sort of constitution which was immune to goose-pimples. The ball flew up into the sky. The game began.

By half-time the score was a low-ish four goals, three of them Jenny's and one Esther's. Nicola would have felt worse about it, except that the Farringdon team had only scored six. "Truly, _not_ our fault," she said to Miss Craven as the rest sucked orange-quarters. "Kara's stopped pretty much everything they threw at us. It's just that their Goal Keeper stops pretty much everything _we_ throw at them."

Miss Craven looked unimpressed by this reasoning, and delivered herself of a homily concerning having expected better from a team who had, in many cases, been playing together since the Lower Fourth. "And Third, in Jenny's case," she added, at which Jenny, making hasty disclaiming noises, swallowed a lump of orange-pulp and had to be led off and banged between the shoulder-blades by Miranda.

The scores stayed low, and, until the final moments, frustratingly level, until Esther received a final desperate pass from Lawrie, who only just had her feet in the right part of the court, and secured the game for them at nine goals to eight. "No-one's going to get their colours just on the strength of _that_ match," said Nicola judiciously, "but not a bad effort. Let's go and watch the Second Seniors."

There was a scatter of rain at the beginning of the Second Senior match and an enormous clap of thunder five minutes from the end. Miss Craven blew her whistle. Spectators and players alike ran gratefully for shelter. Miss Craven waited, thumb on top of the timer, and made polite conversation with her opposite number until the rain retreated; but the tail-end of the game was a poor limp thing, and the result was eighteen to nine in Farringdon's favour. No one, Nicola thought as she watched Meena and Linda make effortful vivacious conversation with their opposite numbers on the way back to the bus, had really emerged with credit, and Bunty looked as if she were about to cry.

"I'm sorry, Nick," said Linda, plumping into the seat next to Nicola in the coach on the way back.

Jenny, who had spent the journey in that particular seat asking Nicola questions about vector algebra, looked aggrieved. She looked round for an empty place, and found herself sitting down next to Miss Craven instead, ensuring herself a post-mortem on the Second Seniors all the way back; which, Nicola thought, would probably stand her in very good stead for when she was Games Captain after Nicola herself had left.

"Oh, don't worry about it, Linda," said Nicola, making an effort. "You just need more practices together, that's all."

Linda shook her head. "I really hate saying it, but we missed Jodie and Victorine. I know Bunty's only just fifteen, but still, she's not a _patch_ on Jodie."

"Bunty will settle down. First match nerves happen to the best of us."

The coach bounced into life and made its cautious, sway-backed way out through the wide Farringdon gates. Linda looked unconvinced. "She was Captain of the Juniors two years running, I don't know what she's got to be nervous about. Besides, it's not just her. We were _sloppy_. I mean, if you need to pass to Victorine, you don't even have to look round, you _know_ she's going to be there, but that lot were all over the place. The stupid thing is, it's not even as if Victorine didn't _want_ to play. I thought she was putting it on at first, but she's really upset."

Nicola wondered why Victorine's upsetness was supposed to be her problem. "Well, she shouldn't have dropped out, then. What did she think was going to happen?"

"Well, I'm not sure - I don't _listen_ to them, but you can't not, when people are forever chatting away two beds away from you," said Linda with proper hesitancy, pleating her girdle with her fingers. "What I _think_ it is, is they thought Keith might put them on the First team to show it wasn't favouritism."

"Then they shouldn't be playing netball in the first place, for fear that it'll overheat their feeble little brains," said Nicola in utter disbelief. "What total _charlies_. They must have known Keith wouldn't. Not that she interferes in the teams, anyway," she added hastily, in case she was suspected of making free with privileged information.

Linda looked tolerantly disbelieving. "Well, we're going to need to do _something_ before the match against the Collegiate, or it'll be _embarrassing_. And not early morning practices, either, I know that look in your eye. It's not like it's the summer term."

"And we don't have floodlights," agreed Nicola, recognising defeat on that front. "I'll see what I can do. How many of you besides Bunty and me are in the Play?"

"I'm not and neither's Meena, but Bonnie's in the Chorus and I think some of the Upper Fifths might be too. Besides, you've got a whacking great part. Tim will never let you skip rehearsals."

"I notice you don't mention Miss Kempe," said Nicola, showing her teeth. "I suppose Esther could take practices..."

"Say Miranda and you'd have a point."

Nicola took a long breath and looked out of the window. Outside there was nothing very much to see except bright orange motorway lights, and some uninteresting-looking brushy trees, and sweeping rain. "Well, all right. But _something_ will have to be done."

Linda nodded, apparently satisfied that Nicola would do it; which was, on the whole, more certainty than Nicola possessed herself.


	7. Teams and Lectures

The rehearsals for the Play were islands of blessed uncomplication in Nicola's life, though, strangely, when she wasn't actually rehearsing the Play, she barely thought about it at all. She'd never had much trouble learning lines, and her interpretation seemed to be generally what Tim and Miss Kempe wanted. The various discussions concerning whether Melissa was to sing her solo to the piano or unaccompanied, and what Erica, who had very improbably indeed been cast as Adam, was supposed to wear on her top half, parted around her like the Red Sea itself; and the songs, whilst a _bit_ kiddish and happy-clappy, could have been a great deal worse.

It was all a bit like that proverb about the sparrow flying through the hall that Miss Kempe was so keen on, Nicola thought as she shut the door of the Theatre behind her. A few minutes of peace, and then she was back out in the cold and the dark again. Or, as in this case, off to change, and then out onto the weak changeable sunshine and the netball court.

Nicola had slotted in practices, First against Second Seniors, whenever everyone involved had a Free Period. This was easier said than done, particularly since not only was Bunty's timetable completely at odds with everyone else's, but Bunty herself was prone to headaches and to feeling delicate, at Nicola's calculation, far longer than was at all medically likely.

"Look - what gives?" Nicola demanded, coming running down a staircase with her hand on the polished baluster, only to find Bunty glooming along far below. "Don't you _want_ to be on the team? It's a terrific compliment to manage it this young, honestly."

"I'm no _good_," said Bunty, hanging off the baluster and desponding. "Everyone thinks so, even if they're too polite to say it. I feel like I ought to be _better_ than the rest of them because I'm younger, but I'm not. And I really loved being Captain of the Junior team, too, and I _hated_ having to hand over to Joanna. I just wish I could muff up all my exams and be in Upper IVB again."

"Well, if you do, they'll drop you into Middle Remove until you catch up, and they aren't allowed to play netball anyway," said Nicola, rather at a loss for what to do with such lumpen wrong-headedness. "You did a good job of marking Lawrie last time."

"That was just Lawrie being off her form."

Nicola remembered the aggravatingly pert Bunty of a few years before, forever dimpling up at the Sixth and offering to run little errands. She hadn't had a lot of time for Bunty then, but she had to admit that at least Bunty-the-Junior had been possessed of the get-up-and-go that Bunty-the-Senior so signally lacked. It was absolutely true, Nicola thought with some wonderment, what Miss Kempe and Miss Cromwell and Miss Latimer and everyone else had been saying for years; people really did go soft-headed in the Lower Fifths.

She opened the outside door and waved Bunty through it. Outside on the pitch, Lawrie, Anna and Jenny were tossing a ball about, and the rest of the teams were coffee-housing. Nicola took a deep breath and counted heads. "Who are we missing? Bonnie - Kara - "

"They've gone to a meeting about Confirmation Classes," said Linda helpfully. Nicola resisted the urge to mutter imprecations unsuitable to a person who, not ten minutes before, had been taking part in what Miss Keith had chosen to describe as a Celebration of our Faith.

"Shall we play five-a-side?" suggested Anna.

"_No._ We're going right back to basics. Pretend you're in the Thirds again. Passing and marking," said Nicola, snatching the ball neatly from Lawrie and bouncing it.

"Honestly, you make it sound like an _exam_," said one of the Upper VB people.

"We do all that in form netball time," said another.

Nicola threw a netball bib at her. "You should be good at it then, shouldn't you? Let's begin."

There was time for a quarter of an hour's play at the end, after Bonnie and Kara had arrived. Olwen played well. Miss Craven must have been watching from a window somewhere, for, in the next revision of the team lists, Olwen was playing on the Second team at Goal Defence, and the Upper VB person she had ousted was Sub. Miss Craven, in her wisdom, had promoted Renée White to substitute for the First. Nicola wondered this crabwise progression was necessary because Renée was one of those people who Miss Keith held opinions about, but it wasn't the sort of thing one could ask.

The next match, against Wade Abbas Collegiate, was a qualified disappointment all round. The First team lost a hard-fought battle, seventeen goals to eighteen, which looked as if it still might have been nineteen to eighteen and victory right up until the final quarter, when Lawrie jumped, caught the ball, took two forbidden steps and was reduced to Ginty-like uselessness for the remainder of the match. The Second team won their match, though, Nicola thought unsparingly, it would have been a crashing disaster if they hadn't; the Collegiate Second Senior team seemed to be made up of any of their Seniors who happened to like to play netball for fun, and frankly they weren't much good.

The Junior team, overexcited by their victory at Farringdon and then overly dismayed to find that an easy victory was not their right and privilege after all, collapsed in the second quarter, failed to pull themselves together and ended up losing by seventeen goals to nine. Rachel Wilmot, whose tendency to be good with Juniors was tolerated by the rest of the Sixth as a rather charming quirk, reported finding Joanna in absolute _floods_ in the Junior Side music-room, where she had been sent with some trivial message from Miss Ussher the morning after.

What with depressed Lower Fifths and weeping Lower Fourths, Nicola, as she said to an audience of Miranda and a half-listening Lawrie, could see no future for netball at Kingscote at all.

"_Après nous, le déluge_," suggested Miranda, which set Lawrie off onto an amusing description of the mess the Chorus were making of the Flood, which took place to an upbeat song called 'Where Can I Park My Ark?', and how she thought that the Colebridge Infants had dealt with the whole thing much better.

"Not that we know what it was like to be in that," said Nicola, treading on Lawrie's foot. "If you and Tim are coming to this lecture, you'd better go and find her, and go and get changed yourself."

Lawrie looked wildly up at the clock on the wall, exclaimed, and went. Miranda, watching her go, thought that that was yet another part of Nick and Lawrie's submerged lives, that she'd never heard about and never would, and that it was time to tactfully turn the subject. "All these lectures," she said as she and Nicola strolled out across the short, frost-crunchy grass. "They couldn't make it clearer what they were doing if they got Miss Boyd to stand up beforehand, and say, _all these universities are touting for your business_."

"Not ours, not until next year," said Nicola, feeling rather glad about it. "And I like illuminated manuscripts, anyway."

"Oh, so do I. It's just..." They opened the fire-door and went suddenly from the silvery-dark gloom outside to the altogether different darkness of the auditorium, which smelt of upholstery and, perplexingly, of shoe-leather. Esther waved shyly from where she was sitting with Helen and Barby. Nicola and Miranda climbed up to join them. It occurred to Nicola that it did, quite often, seem to be Esther, Helen and Barby these days, and she wondered how long it had taken her to notice, and, with a feeling as if a very small elevator had detached itself within her and began to go downwards, exactly how much she minded.

The lecturer, a small round man with a bow-tie that made him look, as Barby enchantedly said, _exactly_ like an egg, was funny and charming, and the illuminated manuscripts were much more interesting than expected, being full of beasts and dragons, irate marginalia, and monks showing their buttocks. He took questions afterwards. Miss Kempe looked round, the alert expression on her face, as Nicola was only too aware, meaning _someone ask a sensible question_.

Helen raised her hand. The lecturer looked, Nicola thought, rather like one of those thousand ships seeing the champagne-bottle swinging straight towards his nose. "Yes. Miss..."

"Helen. Helen Shaw. I wondered whether the illuminations were because people were illiterate?"

"Well, no. You have to understand that these manuscripts would have been seen and handled by very few people. I think we have to look at them far more in the _context_ of a culture of protest among the monks, who might well have been handed over by their parents at seven..."

Tim, rather show-offishly, Nicola thought, asked a long question about Boccaccio. Miranda asked a question about methods of preservation, and another one about what relation the curlicues and sweeps of black letter had to medieval textiles, and seemed quite pleased with the answers to both. "I wonder whether he ran those slides past Miss Keith?" she said, as they strolled back severally towards the lighted school. "I don't know about you, but I think it'd take more academic detachment than I could muster to sit there over coffee in her office and say, this is a dog-headed Pope with a bare bottom."

"If you say it fast enough, it probably just sounds like ornithology," said Nicola. "I think you're right about what you said earlier, about the recruiting drive, though. We should campaign for a chemistry one."

"With explosions?"

"Yes, masses of explosions."

"I liked the Maths one where he kept going on about winning the Pools," said Barby cheerfully. "I should get my Dad to try it. Won't it be _awful_, next year, when it's all UCCA and PCAS forms and things?"

"I think I'm going to go in for economics," said Helen with her usual unrufflement. "Or maybe PPE."

They all looked at her. "Won't you just go on modelling?" said Nicola blankly.

"Oh no. Not forever. It's like being a ballet-dancer - you're washed up by thirty unless you're Isabella Rosselini or something. Though she didn't even _start_ till she was twenty-eight, which is pretty much unheard of. There's girls at my agency who are fifteen."

Nicola said nothing. She was considering Helen; and wondering, for the first time, uneasily, whether _she_ came over as crushingly superior as that sometimes, and if so, whether it inspired those around her with a desire to push her into the nearest river.

Not, of course, that she wanted to push Helen into a river; nor, even, that she expected former B's to stay in the background and let the former A's snaffle up whatever was going, because that was a horrible way to think. It was, she thought, mostly a sneaking disbelief that this could possibly be the same Helen Bagshaw as last year and not a suave impostor; and also a sickening small worm of guilt about who _else_ she had written off as a dim feeble drip and what they might have thought about it. She would probably never have had time for Esther, after that first day, if Esther hadn't been so particularly beautiful - but then, it wasn't just that Helen was beautiful - she still thought that Esther had the edge -

And besides, the only two people who sprang to mind were Lois and Marie, and she was certain she hadn't misjudged either of _them_; one couldn't, not possibly.


	8. Half-Term at Kingscote

Half-term approached with its usual speed, marked by the usual round of rehearsals and practice exams. The ban on visiting the Copper Kettle was superseded as a topic of discussion by an outbreak of collecting for good causes organised by some public-spirited types in Upper VA, and then by a confused incident in which Renée White was alleged to have sworn at Nurse Chrissie. Nicola, regarding Renée with detached compassion as that unfortunate ate her solitary meal in angry-cheeked silence at the end of the Staff table, thought that this was what came of Miss Keith's give-a-dog-a-bad-name-and-hang-him tactics, and that now the netball lists would have to be juggled _again_.

Nicola and Lawrie, both expecting to spend the half-term at Trennels, discovered that they were to remain at school. On the Tuesday before the appointed weekend there came a letter from home, full of dire tidings, which Nicola opened at breakfast. It contained the news that the Dodd children had all caught chicken pox, and that Mrs Marlow was looking after the convalescent Chas and the by now recovered Fob whilst Karen tended to the much more seriously ill Rose.

Nicola would have liked to have Lawrie there to loudly say '_Huh_' to and to speculate with on the connivingness of Karen; but as it was, all she had were Lower IVB. She folded the letter tidily back into its envelope and took an interest in their talk, which was divided about equally between ponies at one end of the table and the term's project on monks and monastic living at the other. Nicola wondered what they would have made of the illuminated manuscripts.

Two days later Lawrie received an invitation to stay with Tim and her parents; Nicola was asked too, but thought somehow she wouldn't. She made the excuse of having signed up to take an excursion party to a Roman Villa which had opened nearby, and neither Tim nor Lawrie seemed particularly devastated to hear it.

\--

Nicola came down to breakfast on the Saturday of half term. She paused on the steps, amused by the hotel-like tinkle and clink of staff and stragglers breakfasting, as opposed to the usual muted roar. Lower IVB had all departed on the Friday, even the tot whose parents were in Saudi Arabia having been whisked off by an aunt to Ilfracombe, so Nicola took her omelette and fruit over to the Sixth's table and ate there, interspersing mouthfuls of omelette with mouthfuls of coffee, and wondering what to do with a free morning.

"Is there any of that coffee left?" asked Winnie, sitting down opposite.

"Actually, no, I only got enough for me. I hadn't realised anyone else was staying. Besides the other prefects who'd signed up to the Excursion List, I mean."

"I can't expect to fly eight thousand miles home just for a half term." Winnie went over to the coffee urn and returned with her own jug. It being none of Nicola's business why Winnie hadn't gone home with Melissa or Victorine or Jodie, she didn't mention it. For all she knew, Winnie's parents didn't like the idea. Though that was just parents, she amended hastily, and not anything to do with being Chinese in particular - "Winnie, people have been _all right_, haven't they?" she asked out of a sudden worry. "I mean - the juniors - no one's been calling you Yellow Peril or anything?"

"Not anyone whose opinion I care about."

Nicola wondered whether or not she had been snubbed. Well, snub or no snub, she couldn't abandon a new girl to spend her day moping about the grounds. The prospect of a blissful free morning reading in the Common Room flickered, became cellophane-thin, and faded altogether. "Let's take a walk down to the coast road and sit and look at the sea," she suggested hospitably.

Winnie looked amused. Nicola felt a small annoyance at superior Wade House girls, and did her best to repress it.

"I'm not _that_ homesick," Winnie said. "Besides, it doesn't look anything like Causeway Bay."

"Well, it's better than slopping around in here all day. We can do our good deed for the day by going down to Noah's Ark and seeing whether anyone's dog needs walking. Unless you don't like dogs?"

"Only with beansprouts," said Winnie solemnly. "Oh, Nicola, your _face_. Joke!"

On the way to Noah's Ark they met Matron, who gave her blessing to the endeavour and undertook to countersign the Signing Out Book on their behalf. Obedient to her instructions, they wrapped up warm and took the coast road at a brisk pace, in the company of a very young and enthusiastic spaniel who belonged to someone in the Tutorial Fifth. By the time the sea came into view Nicola still wasn't sure she _liked_ Winnie, but she was cautiously willing to admit a definite preference for her over the empty-headed Melissa, and certainly over Victorine or Jodie, who she wouldn't have as a job lot.

"Were you very friendly with Victorine and Jodie before?" she asked curiously, as they sat amongst the sandy, tussocky grass, watching the spaniel dig holes and disappear into them until only a frantically wagging stern was visible.

Winnie took her time about answering, so Nicola hugged her knees and looked out over her own booted feet, at the sea, and its uncertain pale border with the sky. It was always comforting to look at the sea, vast and changeless and the colour of her mother's grey mother-of-pearl earrings, making constant fractal lace-patterns on the sand. She was unsure whether Winnie felt similarly or was just being polite.

"I wouldn't say _very friendly_," said Winnie precisely at last. "Friendlier than I was with some of the others."

That got them nowhere; so Nicola asked respectful questions about Hong Kong, which Winnie answered, and eventually, by fits and starts, it turned into a proper conversation, and then looped suddenly back like a snake sliding over its own tail onto the subject of the differences between Kingscote and Wade House.

"The first day I was here, I thought, what is this great warren that smells of carbolic soap?" said Winnie, without either apology or any particular heat. "Go here, don't go there, don't use that door, sit at a little desk, go to the gym and throw beanbags with little children, sleep in a room that smells of other peoples' shoes. It felt like I'd joined the Army. If the Army were run by mad people."

For the first time in her life, Nicola felt moved to defend Miss Keith. "But all schools are like that, really, aren't they? I bet your headmistress back at Wade House had her little ways."

"Oh, she was very big on inter-House competitions. Everything from swimming to needlework. And we all had to go to this strange voice-coaching friend of hers," Winnie admitted, tucking her legs under her skirt and smoothing out the hem, and looking soignée in a way that reminded Nicola, though she absolutely couldn't _think_ why, of the various films involving people wandering about amongst sand-dunes and suffering from angst about water-courses that they'd watched, weekly, in the run-up to French O-level. She supposed that was why the Wade House girls admired Esther and Helen, and could occasionally be found nattering even with Barby about the right number of buttons on a jacket or the proper length of a skirt; they _cared_ about clothes in a way that not even Ginty, who was generally believed to be able to pull on a feed-sack and look like Grace Kelly, ever did, and Nicola was not sure whether she disapproved of it or not. It made _Changear_ feel a million years ago, that was certain.

"She had this peculiar, _matted_ cottage-loaf of hair," Winnie was continuing, "and her house smelt, and we all had to say bah, bah, bah, bah, with bones between our teeth."

"_Bones_?"

"Little bones on necklaces. We used to tell the juniors that she _made_ them from animals that were run over outside her house," said Winnie, smiling ghoulishly. "But I think they just came from a catalogue. The elocution is better here. She was a crazy person. _But_," she added with a disconcerting snapping-open of her usually lazy eyes, "at least all the seniors had their own rooms, or shared in pairs. I'm surprised you aren't all stabbing each other in the back to be Head Girl and have your own study."

"And have the Staff knocking on the door and dropping in every five minutes? Ugh, no. I'd sooner call my life my own," said Nicola frankly. "Besides, Kay - my sister, one of the ones who was Head Girl, Ann was the other one - always said it was _miles_ from the study to the bathroom and she was always deathly afraid of traipsing out at dead of night and running into Keith in a candlewick dressing-gown."

"One of the girls who was Senior when I was Junior said that before there were quite so many people at Wade House, Mrs Frith - the headmistress - used to say goodnight to them all personally. I think she was making a joke, though," said Winnie detachedly. "Or else it was to make sure no one was slipping out to meet sailors."

Nicola blinked at her, unsure whether Winnie was joking herself. The spaniel returned, wagging its whole body from the neck down in an ecstacy of eagerness to be liked. Nicola snapped its lead back on, and suggested they take a walk down by the surf. "Before the tide comes in."

"So that we don't get trapped in a cave and have to be rescued by your admiring Juniors," said Winnie approvingly, holding out a hand to be pulled to her feet.

Nicola obliged. "They're not _my_ admiring Juniors. They're Lawrie's. And it's not like she encourages them."

"She encourages that miniature Kiwi in Victorine's bedroom," Winnie contradicted her. Winnie did not seem to mind contradicting people, Nicola thought; and whilst she was perfectly _polite_, she seemed to use approximately half as many _ums_ and _sorrys_ and _I thinks_ as other people. It reminded her a little of Miranda, when she'd only known Miranda at a distance. "They were chattering on the other day about record-tokens."

"_Record-tokens_?" The world paused; caught its breath; and rolled onwards, seagulls, low autumn light over the bay, and all. Nicola watched the spaniel, frolicking gloriously at the waterline, and tried to work out how to phrase what she had to ask. Perhaps it could wait until she had asked Lawrie for all the particulars. Or then again, perhaps it couldn't.

There couldn't possibly be _two_ record-tokens floating around the same dorm, could there? And there wasn't likely to be a chance to get Winnie without the rest of the dreadful Wade House mob about her again. She took a breath. "Winnie - look, I know perhaps you don't want to tell me, but was it _Victorine_'s record-token? I mean, Victorine wasn't trying to _sell_ Daisy the record-token, was she? Or bullying her into taking it and hiding it amongst her things? Because Keith always comes down like a ton of bricks on anything like that..."

"Oh, no. Nothing like that," said Winnie with the same quelling firmness she had managed earlier. She looked up at Nicola, squinting, the low sun in her eyes. "Why are you being like this?"

"I'm not being like anything," said Nicola, feeling a Lawrie-like sense of accused alarm. "At least, I'm not meaning to be."

"_Courteous_, I mean. Hospitable." Winnie rolled the dog's lead around and around her hand. "You weren't when we first came. None of you prefects were. You did what Tim Keith calls the out-cutlasses-and-board look." Nicola winced; she hadn't realised Tim was still taking pleasure in that particular description. "Louise and Miranda and the rest of them treated us like we were eight years old and stupid with it, and Rachel _shuddered_ whenever we opened our mouths."

"I think that was the elocution," said Nicola. "Anyway, the only people _you_ were willing to give the time of day to were Esther and Helen, and I can't see either of them being all that forthcoming with the hearty welcomes."

"But Esther and Helen were new, like us," said Winnie in what sounded like honest puzzlement.

"Esther - I _suppose_ \- yes. If you can call it new. Helen's been here longer than me."

Winnie shrugged. "She seemed new," she said distantly.

Nicola thought she _ought_ to make amends. "If we go down the coast a bit, maybe we can buy an ice cream at that little hut place that does teas." she offered.

"At this time of year?"

"Well, we could get teas, then. If it isn't shut. And some water for this dog."

"He hasn't got enough water?" said Winnie, looking out at the broad sea. This time, Nicola thought she recognised Winnie's joke-face, which was slightly more serious and puzzled than normal; a private code, like Miss Cromwell's amused ferocity, and Winnie grinned at her recognising it, more amused than abashed.

It was _very_ like the early days of knowing Miranda, Nicola thought, as they turned westward with the wind in their faces; or perhaps, she thought, as the wind insinuated itself past her scarf and in through her sleeves at the wrists, like the early days of knowing Tim. It was _odd_ how people could be utterly themselves, and still have facets that reflected _other_ people; she would have to talk to Patrick about it. Except that that would mean talking to Patrick, which would mean talking about whether he planned to enter the Church; and, on the whole, she found herself glad of the long pebbled beach that meandered away towards the cliffs far beyond, and of Winnie's occasionally abrasive but interesting company, and not missing Trennels after all.


	9. Sunday Evening

Nicola sought Lawrie out the moment she might reasonably be expected to have returned from Tim's parents, and found her unpacking her weekend-case. "It was _fab_," she said enthusiastically. "We went and watched speedway racing, and ate hot dogs in the cold whilst Tim's father was sketching."

"That doesn't sound a _bit_ like Tim's idea of fun."

"Oh, her father's been contracted to do a series of murals for the front of a Transport Museum somewhere," Lawrie explained vaguely. "I'd sooner have that than your mouldy old Romans, anyway."

"Well, I'd have enjoyed it more if the Fourths and Fifths hadn't all kept wandering off," Nicola admitted, sitting on her sister's bed. She liked the large, modern room, with its pale pine furniture and jazzy abstract curtains, but all the same, it was still _odd_ to think of Lawrie in one proper dormitory and herself in another. Then again, she supposed, not even Keith could exile Lawrie to Sara Crewe all on her own. "None of them seemed to want to see anything but the café and the gift shop."

"Did you eat dormice?"

"What? _No_! You are the most..."

"I always did think Redmond was putting it on about that," said Lawrie complacently, shaking out a blouse and looking at it critically. "Why have I got this top of yours?"

"I was _looking_ for that!" Conscious that visiting wasn't really allowed, and that it particularly behoved prefects to set an example, Nicola mustered her resources and got on with what she'd come here for. She was grateful at least that she and Lawrie were alone in the dormitory. This was all difficult enough without a gaggle of Fourths lolling about the place listening in. "Look here, Lal, what do you know about Daisy Lewis and a record-token?"

"Who are you, the Spanish Inquisition?" Lawrie smiled sweetly at her twin. "If you're going to _be_ here, you can help put these on hangers."

"Yes, all _right_, I _suppose_... What about Daisy?"

"Oh, Victorine was prowling about like a wet week _looking_ for something, and asking to look in other peoples' handkerchief-cases, and stuff, and then Daisy found a record-token card under her bed and asked Victorine if it was that she was looking for, and Victorine snatched it off her. It had a quite soppy design on it, so Daisy asked Victorine if it was from a boy, and Victorine blew up at her for _reading_ it, and Daisy got aggrieved because she hadn't. Well, you wouldn't, would you? I mean, even if it just said _Love From Aunty_ inside, it's still like reading someone else's letters, it's not like it's a _postcard_... So Daisy's been talking about boyfriends in Victorine's hearing whenever she can ever since, and now some of the rest of them have picked it up."

Nicola hung up Lawrie's coat. "Is _that_ why Victorine's been looking like her fur's been brushed the wrong way?"

"Has she?" said Lawrie, sounding as if this was the first time she'd given it any thought.

Nicola shook her head at the continuing and infuriating _Lawrie_-ness of Lawrie. "Look - Lal - can you tell Daisy to drop it?"

Lawrie, arrested in the act of stuffing a nightie into her childish panda nightdress-case, looked as affronted and bewildered as if she'd suddenly been informed that she had been volunteered for a Sponsored Run. "_Me_? You're the prefect."

"Yes, and you're the one the Fourths have been treating like something out of _Smash Hits_," said Nicola, waving a hand at the row of good-luck cards and small gifts which reposed on the shelf in the wardrobe which Lawrie shared with Linda. They included an inch-high teddy bear, a painstakingly hand-made needlecase - as if Lawrie ever did any needlework if she could help it - and, she noticed with more infuriation than delight, one of the souvenir striped pencils from the Roman Villa gift shop. "So you get to be the one to squash Daisy."

"I'm not a bit good at squashing," said Lawrie pathetically. "Not like you."

"Well, _try_," said Nicola in exasperation, and removed herself and the blouse back to the school buildings proper, which, despite official disapproval, were coming to be known as Old Block, with all the usual jokes about chips which one might expect. Come to that, despite the way it said over the door of the new buildings, _Dobson-Brown House_, no one ever called that by its proper name, either...

In the common-room, she found a cheering fire and a traumatised-looking Esther. "What's the matter?" asked Nicola, not overly worried, since life's little alarms always did loom twice as big to Esther as to anyone else. "Is Laurence still not getting on with her new school? You tell her in six years time everyone will be dead jealous of her for speaking French and getting an O-level for free..."

"Oh, she's doing lots better." Esther fumbled in a pocket, and proudly showed Nicola a Polaroid, in which Esther was kneeling down on the most _unlikely_ carpet hugging a very French-looking child with short dark hair. "And Mummy and George are going to have another baby, isn't it wonderful? I hope it's a boy this time."

"Look at you, eldest of the family," said Nicola admiringly. "So you had a good weekend?"

"Yes. No. Mostly. I went out to dinner with Helen and her parents - they were in London too - " Esther twisted herself around and addressed herself to the wing of the chair. "And this _horrible_ old vulture of a woman came over - all red nails and smarmy smile and oversized glasses - and said hello to Helen, and made me stand up and turn around and said I had possibilities if I lost five pounds, and gave me her card."

"I hope you tore it into little tiny pieces," said Nicola forthrightly, regarding the waif-like Esther with blank astonishment. "The only way you could lose five pounds would be if you cut one foot off. Give it here, _I'll_ do it - in fact, I'll put it on the fire - there, gone."

"Everyone was _looking_ at me," said Esther again, miserably.

"Everyone looks at you when you play netball, and you don't mind that."

"It's different," said Esther and let her forehead fall down against the wing of the chair. She curled herself up, hugging her knees distressfully, as if she were some delicate creeping sea creature and the chair her shell, and made a noise somewhere between a sob and a cough.

Nicola knew from experience that Esther hated crying and was always distressed by it afterwards, needing glasses of water and calm, undemanding conversation and generally to be treated like a convalescent invalid until she pulled herself together. Unless Esther had changed over the last three years, and people _didn't_, Nicola thought, not about things like that. She patted Esther's hand and went to get a tooth-glass of water from the nearest bathroom; they were not supposed to borrow the tooth-glasses, but Nicola thought that this was probably a worthy enough cause.

Nicola dawdled by the door of the bathroom, ready to fend off any member of the Sixth who approached the common-room; but, luck smiling on her for once, no one did.

As she returned, Esther flitted past her, returning some moments later with a brave newly washed face. "It was _horrible_," she said again, cupping her hands around the tooth-glass; and then, purposefully putting the weekend behind her, "So how was _your_ half-term?"

"Not bad," said Nicola, surprised to find it so. "I spent quite a lot of it with Winnie."

"I like Winnie," said Esther, sounding surprised at finding in herself anything as decided as a preference. "She reminds me a bit of you."

Nicola blinked, really not sure whether that was a compliment or not. Before she could form anything as coherent as a thought, Louise appeared in the doorway, with the look on her face that Nicola always thought of as meaning very official business. "Phone for you in Mrs Clements' room, Nicola. Family news, she says."

Nicola hastily ducked back into the bathroom to tidy her hair into the state necessary for meeting any member of staff, even one as generally rumpled herself as Mrs Clements; and then scurried down the stairs, a prey to all kinds of blancmange-formless, Esther-like terrors. _Family news_ might be anything from Peter getting his first commission to their father being posted to the South Seas to Ginty getting kicked out of Oxford to Rose having had a relapse...

"Don't be silly, no one dies of chicken pox," Nicola told herself bracingly as she knocked on the door to the secretary's office. "G'd evening, Mrs Clements. Louise said someone wanted me on the phone, please?"

"Oh - yes - over there - " said Mrs Clements, who seemed to be sorting out the Lost Property Box. The room was bedecked with everything from infant-sized mittens to a quite new-looking portable radio cassette player.

Nicola picked up the phone. "H-hello - Nicola Marlow speaking - " she said huskily.

"Oh, Nick!" Patrick's voice crackled down the phone, unlikely in this setting as the perfectly inexplicable traffic-cone which Mrs Clements had just hauled out of the box, pulling her back sharply to September and the pale ploughed horizons of home. "Isn't it blissful? Thomasine!"

"What are you talking about? Isn't what blissful? Thomasine who?" Nicola hissed, mindful of Mrs Clements, even though Mrs Clements was paying no attention to her whatever but instead attempting to pair the mittens and hang them on the radiator. "I don't believe you rang me on this number. It was sheer luck Keith booted the Lambert after her year, and Mrs Clements doesn't know your voice - "

"I had to tell somebody or I'd burst," he said, sounding as if it was a perfectly rational thing to do, "and I remembered the number."

"I should think it'd be etched with letters of fire, but I didn't expect you to actually go _ringing_..."

"Thomasine Helena Mary!" Patrick interrupted, sounding so purely joyous that Nicola wondered whether the Pope had died whilst she was distracted by a Past Paper or something, and they'd elected a staunch traditionalist with a very peculiar name as the next one. "Seven pounds, eleven ounces, looks _exactly_ like my Uncle Alex in a baby-bonnet, not that she has a baby-bonnet, it's all very modern."

"Oh, the _baby_." Relief bloomed over Nicola, and a mad sort of second-hand joy that stemmed from Patrick being so _very_ silly and trusting her as someone he could be silly to. "That's fabulous. Tell your mum _tons_ of congrats. Patrick -"

"Speaking. Yes, pa, I'm putting my scarf on _as we speak_ \- sorry, Nick, this person wants to go, we're off to pay court -"

"Did you ever think any more about - about that other thing?"

There was a muffled sort of noise at the other end, and then it was Mr Merrick on the line, apologising for the incivility, and she was returning rather shy congratulations and being thanked for them. The receiver clicked down and the line went dead. So she supposed Patrick couldn't have heard her, after all.

"Everything all right?" said Mrs Clements kindly. "Would you like to sit down and have a cup of tea?"

"Oh, no, everything's fine," said Nicola, appalled by the brief vision of herself as victim of emotional trauma. "A baby. They're telling everybody."

She should have _known_ this would be fatal, as Mrs Clements pressed a cup of tea on her anyway and told her an amusing story involving the number of people _Mr_ Clements had rung up after the birth of the Clements daughter, including a wrong number that turned out to be a High Court Judge, until Miss Kempe came in to talk about photocopying posters for the Play, and Nicola thought it best to take herself away, accompanied by a folder of Stella's that had got into the Lost Property Box.

First Esther and then Patrick, she thought, and both of them as overjoyed as each other; she couldn't imagine why anyone should be _so_ thrilled about babies. One of the light-bulbs had blown on the staircase, and as she passed through the patch of shadow she found herself thinking that by the time Thomasine Helena Mary Merrick was in the Lower Sixth of whatever convent she ended up at, she, Nicola, would be thirty-two. This was such a startling thought that she nearly stumbled on the last step; and thinking that at least by then all of the troubles of teams and A-levels would be far in the past didn't really make it any less so.

"Nicola, have you heard?" demanded Joanna, who was hanging about at the top of the staircase looking angelic, and obviously bursting with news.

"Heard what?" asked Nicola, wondering dazedly whether babies counted as disasters coming in threes and if so whether Mrs Bellamy or someone had suffered a sudden addition to the family.

Joanna drew in a tremendous breath. "Anna Fitzpatrick fell off the parallel bars and she's been _rushed to hospital_."

"No need for you to be hanging around like a ghoul because of that, I'm sure Miss Cartwright will keep you informed," said Nicola briskly. "Off you go back to your common-room, or wherever it is you're going."

"Yes, Nicola," said Joanna, very properly. "Only the sub's Renée, and they had an _Assembly_ last week about _her_. Who's going to play for the First now?"

"I'll be sure to inform you about that the moment the lists go up," said Nicola firmly. "Off you _go_."

When she put her head back through the door of the Sixth Form common room, Esther was sitting with some other people listening to records, and _looked_ recovered, at least, though with Esther one could never really tell. Barbara was writing to her boyfriend, Maggie Sutton was reading the newspaper, and Stella was doing some prep. "Present for you," said Nicola, handing over the folder with a flourish.

Stella hugged the folder. "Oh, Nick, you angel. I thought I'd have to borrow notes off Elaine."

"De nada," said Nicola grandly. She looked around for Winnie, but no Winnie presented herself. There was no Linda, either, no Daphne, no Pauline Baker, no Olwen... oh, of course, there was a Community Service Volunteers' meeting, Nicola remembered seeing a notice about it when she was pinning up Craven's latest notice concerning proper decorum whilst out on long-distance runs. On the edge of the group listening to records, she spotted Melissa, who was rather listlessly putting her tinselly blonde hair into lots of tiny plaits. She supposed that Melissa would have to do instead, little as she relished the prospect. "Melissa, can I talk to you a minute?"

"What about?" said Melissa in an unfriendly way.

"Do you know where I could find Victorine and Jodie? I want to have a word."

"Haven't you done enough, getting them booted off the team?"

Nicola took a deep breath. "Do any of you _want_ to play netball, or not?"

Melissa blinked. "What? Are you saying there's a place on the team?"

"Yes. Anna FitzP fell off the parallel bars and got rushed off to casualty, and the substitute's Renée White, and no one's going to let _her_ play after that business in the San."

Melissa looked smug. "And now you can't manage without us?"

"_Look_," said Nicola, nearing the edge of her patience, "if Miss Keith writes you down as an uncooperative type, then that's it, set in stone, practically forever. Believe me, I know. I know you're in your final year, but you might think about Victorine and Jodie. And Winnie, actually. I've never in my life seen such a shoo-in to be made a prefect, but _not_, I shouldn't think, if there's still all this silliness about the team hanging in the air."

"I don't need you to tell me to think about Victorine and Jodie," grumbled Melissa, scrambling to her feet. "Or about Winnie, either. If your Miss Keith had any sense she'd have made her Head Girl in the first place, like Mrs Frith was going to."

"Well, she's got another year, she might do it yet. Hurry _up_, or we won't have any time before I have to go off and supervise Junior Supper."

"You Marlows just think you have the answer to everything, don't you?" said Melissa resentfully, trailing after Nicola to the door. "I can't imagine what it must have been like with four or five of you about the place."

"Very much like it was when there were six, I imagine," said Nicola, enjoying the look of limp-mouthed affrontment and shock on Melissa's face. "Are you coming with me to find Victorine and Jodie, or not?"

They found Victorine and Jodie on their way to the squash courts, at which Melissa washed her hands of the business (probably, Nicola thought, because she reckoned that if any of them got onto the team it would be Victorine or Jodie rather than her, and she didn't want the row if it all turned out badly) and Nicola explained herself.

The interview with Victorine and Jodie was not terribly pleasant, though relatively productive. Victorine and Jodie agreed to go and apologise to Miss Craven (and could say with perfect truth that they hadn't heard of Anna's broken wrist, because Nicola, belatedly prudent, hadn't told them); Nicola agreed to be a character witness; and Victorine handed over the record token on the understanding that it would be quietly returned to Linda with no questions asked. Fortunately it was intact, since on the two Shopping Saturdays that Victorine had signed up for, the prefects had been Miranda and Olwen respectively, and Victorine had been waiting for her chance with the less observant Elaine or Rachel.

On the way to Miss Craven's room they had the ill-luck to run into Miss Cromwell, who briskly demanded to know the purpose of the delegation and then enquired with devastating politeness whether Victorine and Jodie were in need of an interpreter. Judging by the depth of Victorine's blush and the expression of fury which crossed Jodie's usually pertly flaccid features, Nicola reckoned that Miss Cromwell had run up across the Chinese slang and dealt with it in her usual fashion.

However, Miss Cromwell saved her pet strain of sarcasm for prefects, preferring not to waste it on such lesser adversaries as members of the Upper Fifth. After delivering herself of a brisk lecture on officiousness, she observed that Nicola obviously had too little to do, and dispatched her off to supervise the Third Remove, whose evening it was to play ping-pong. She ended up coaching as well as supervising, which burned off some of the feelings that she had - even if for the best of reasons - ended up behaving a bit more like Tim than she would have liked.

"Where did you get to?" demanded Miranda, when Nicola returned to the common room. "Esther's in a flap. She thinks you must have been ringing some woman in London and tearing her off a strip. I told her I doubted you'd ever pick up an unsanctioned telephone again after the Conduct Mark business, but you know how Esther is."

"No, I was making sure the Thirds didn't swallow ping-pong balls, or give each other nightmares speculating about Anna's accident in the gym. Gruesome moppets that they are," said Nicola with feeling.

She wondered whether it was worth telling Miranda that it had been Patrick doing the phoning. She thought not. She didn't know why, particularly, just that Miranda probably wouldn't be interested. And also, Miranda might think Patrick had been a bit of a fool, calling the school office, after the Conduct Mark business, as Miranda had called it.

In fact, Nicola realised now that she was out of the office and away from the sudden sharp bliss of hearing Patrick's voice, _she_ thought Patrick had been fairly foolish, herself. He could have... _he could have got her into trouble_ became a phrase lewdly and winkingly horrid, and she disgustedly substituted _she could have ended up in Keith's office again_. She might be pleased - she supposed she was, or ought to be - for Mr and Mrs Merrick, and possessed of vague and kindly feelings towards Thomasine, though not to anything like the extent she was willing to extend to, say, an orphan lamb; but as far as Patrick himself went, it was an idiotish thing to do, and for him not to have _realised_ that was more idiotish still.

"Is Linda in your Art group tomorrow morning?" she asked Miranda.

"Yes, she's one of Jennings' silk-screen printing lot. Why?"

"Can you give her this?" said Nicola, glad that she wasn't going to have to have a heart-to-heart with Linda as well as everything else, and that she'd thought to beg an envelope from Mrs Clements on the off-chance that she'd acquire a record-token to put in it. She slid the token into the envelope, the soppy picture of a bear cuddling a heart-shaped balloon disappearing along with its scribbled message from one Christian O'Donnell; and thought that whatever the foolishness of Patrick, at least he wasn't the only one. The thought made her feel rather better.

She gave the envelope to Miranda. "And tell her it's all right. I've sorted things out."


	10. Make Me A World

And now the term sped on towards Christmas. The weather worsened, to the point that even the most determined of fresh-air fiends saw the point of working in the library rather than on the roof. Nicola, playing more than competently in the final match of the season, thought that the new school tracksuits would be very welcome, and it was a pity Keith hadn't thought of them years ago. The cold air made a tiny icicle-cavern of her throat, and her arms and legs felt as if the moment they left off being warm from the game's exertions they would be very cold indeed. And then she leapt to receive a pass from Jodie, pulling the ball out of the sky; and had no more time to think about the weather, or anything else.

They lost the match, in the end, a close-fought twenty-one goals to twenty-two; but the Second Seniors won theirs, and that, Nicola thought, watching a glowing Bunty drinking tea and chattering in almost the old style to Meena at the tea afterwards, was the way round she'd have had it, if someone had offered her the choice of one or the other.

And then, surprised at finding such an Ann-like cuckoo thought in her own breast, and conscious of her social duties, she saw the Brockhurst games mistress looking stranded, and went to make polite conversation about the next term's hockey.

The Dress Rehearsal for the Play went, as Dress Rehearsals often do, in so halting and accident-prone a fashion that Tim was rumoured to have gone to ground in one of the music-rooms and to be refusing entry to all well-wishers except Lawrie. "I don't see how it's _ever_ going to come right," said Olwen heavily, as some of the Sixth-form members of the cast and crew sat around in the Theatre afterwards. "I mean, a _pyramid_ nearly fell on me. That's not right. And I'm sorry, and I know there's all those little Chorusers to be daubed with makeup, but letting Claire whats-her-name do her own Eve makeup is a _disaster_. She looks like she's been dead for a fortnight. I don't know why Tim doesn't take her in hand."

"She's using the wrong colour base," said Helen, drifting in with a large box of chocolates. "The lights pick up all the yellow pigments in it."

Everyone looked at her respectfully. "You should give her a hand," said Daphne loudly. "_You_ know about all that kind of stuff. At least, I suppose you do. Or is it other people making you up?"

"Yes, mostly it is," said Helen, not taking offence. "But you get to see what kind of thing they use. And I do my own for going out and stuff."

"You _could_ do Claire's for her, if she doesn't mind," said Nicola, thinking how it might be arranged. "You're not on as Pharaoh until miles later."

Helen, in an infuriatingly Helen-like fashion, looked noncommital. She opened the box and passed it along the row of seats.

"Lovely chocolates," said Barby enthusiastically, taking two and passing the box on to Bonnie. "To wish us luck?"

"To wish _me_ luck, actually, from all my friends in IIIA. It must have taken nearly all their pocket money. I don't know how they're going to afford flowers for Miss Ussher."

"If I were Ussher, I'd settle for a Chorus that sang on key, and came in on time," said Olwen in her mournfully trumpeting voice. "And hadn't you two Maths people better get moving? The bell's about to go, and you know what Crommie's like."

Nicola hastily unbucketed herself from her seat and hurried out, grateful that her fellow Maths person was Erica Shelland, whose long legs had got her the part of Adam, and not, for example, someone built on a miniature scale like Stella Afford; and reflecting that if Moses _had_ been anything like Olwen then the Israelites must have been deeply, deeply thankful to get out of that desert.

The bell was just clanging away into silence as they returned to the main building. Nicola and Erica made faces at each other. "We'd better run," Nicola decided. "It's not like the Seconds will see us and get ideas - they should all be virtuously tucked away in their classrooms by now - "

Erica nodded dubiously. But then Miss Redmond came round the corner, laced-up black shoes clicking on the floor, and said "Ah, Nicola. Just something I meant to have a word about with you, if the occasion presented itself - "

Erica made helpless faces; Nicola gave a _no, you beetle along_ twitch of her head and fell reluctantly into step beside Miss Redmond. It must be about Patrick, she thought, one hand shaking ridiculously under her pile of folders, Mrs Clements must have let slip something about the phone call amidst her nattering... "Yes, Miss Redmond?"

"About the way you handled the vacancy on the First Senior netball team. Whilst I appreciate that you thought you were working to bring the two schools together, I don't think Anna's parents would have been too happy if they'd heard how you went about it, do you?"

Nicola thought that Anna's parents probably had bigger things to worry about, but one couldn't say that to a staff. Instead, she said in the flattest, most neutral tone of voice she could muster "Is Anna feeling better? Did she get the card we sent her?"

"Yes, I noticed you making yourself busy about that. Perhaps you could think about giving the others a chance, sometimes. No one likes a bossyboots, Nicola."

"No, Miss Redmond."

Miss Redmond hesitated, sensible feet turning towards the cookery classroom, body not quite turning with them. "Nicola, I do wish you would understand that when people give you advice, they generally mean it in your best interests. Not even the Games Captain is perfect, you know."

"No, Miss Redmond," said Nicola again, stonier still. Miss Redmond looked as if she might say something more, but instead gave a small constrained shrug and went into the classroom. Nicola, embarrassed and annoyed, ran the rest of the way to her tutor group. She arrived to find Miss Cromwell watching with her usual expression of amused ferocity as Pomona worked through an equation on the blackboard.

"Ah, Nicola. How good of you to grace us with your presence."

"I'm sorry, Miss Cromwell. Miss Redmond kept me."

"I was under the impression that you had given up Home Economics. Or does Miss Redmond now do remedial work among the non-cooking masses?"

"No, Miss Cromwell. It was about the netball team."

"Despite the fact that the last netball match of the term took place last week? Sit down, Pomona. Nicola, since you _are_ on your feet, kindly continue from there."

Nicola, receiving the chalk and a sympathetic glance from Pomona, found, to her relief, that the equation was of a class that she had come across in a Past Paper the week before. She worked it through methodically, and was rewarded with a nod from Miss Cromwell, and permission to pick up her pile of papers and her calculator and, finally, sit down at her desk.

After Maths came lunch; and, since Lower IVB were out at the Minster Museum making notes and brass-rubbings to embellish their project on monks, Nicola took her tray to the Sixth's table. Miranda sat down next to her. "Are you all right? Pippin said Crommie was _madly_ insulting."

"I'd sooner have Crommie being insulting than Redmond calling me a _bossyboots_," said Nicola. "Miranda -"

"Speaking."

"Would you mind doing my stint keeping an eye on the Junior common rooms this evening? I'll do yours next week."

"Yes, if you like," said Miranda tolerantly, not bothering, as Louise undoubtedly would have done, with a prefatory _we're not supposed to swap_. "I had one of the music-rooms booked, but I can always practice before breakfast. For all I know Tim's still lairing in there, anyway, licking her wounds. What is it you need to get done?"

"Not me. _You_. In your role as Oldest Inhabitant. I want you to tell the Thirds and Fourths a story. All about when you were in IIA, and how Keith had a special assembly and tore into the people who were cracked on Eileen Benson and Joyce Craig. With _particular_ reference to the foolishness of buying seniors presents."

Miranda looked at her, a slow smile beginning to curl about her mouth. "You know," she said, stretching luxuriously back in her most unluxurious chair, "it might just work."

\--

The Play itself went by, for Nicola, improbably quickly. It seemed only moments from the muffled sound of feet and chocolate-boxes out in the auditorium, and the _deep_ wish that the curtain would never come up and reveal them, to Lawrie's comic turn creating the Garden of Eden at Nicola's behest; and from there to the backchat between the angels, _so_ unlike the dignified angels of Christmas Plays of yore, and then to Claire and Erica, managing a sort of poignancy as Adam and Eve, expelled from grace, even though Claire, poor thing, was obviously rigid with nerves.

After that, there was Melissa, looking dislikably smug in her angel's white robes, but at least not making a total mess of singing her solo, _East of Eden_; and then - and the sudden upward shift of interest in the audience was a tangible, disconcerting thing - Helen was coming on to play her small part as Pharaoh. There was a small outburst of clapping from the front - _visitors_, Nicola thought, not, after all, the hero-worshipping Fourths - and some camera flashes went off.

But fortunately there wasn't much more. A bit more backchat with Helen and Lawrie - Lawrie liking the attention, not, Nicola thought, realising that it wasn't for her - and then Olwen singing _Let My People Go_, her doom-laden voice sounding, for once, entirely full of the proper kind of gravitas.

Applause. A call for the producer. Flowers for Tim - flowers, much showier ones, in cellophane, from someone in the audience, for Helen, which were quickly intercepted by Miss Kempe - and then the curtain came down for the final time and the audience were filing out, and Nicola was being roped in, the moment she'd removed her own greasepaint, to help wipe the faces of the shrilly excited Juniors in the Chorus.

"It was all right, wasn't it?" said Bonnie, on the same duty; and Nicola, amazed, was able to agree that it was, and that honestly, she'd never met a Play that had gone more smoothly.

Nicola was not usually one for dreading social occasions, but for some reason she felt rather more like going up to the Common Room, or reading in the Library, than mingling with the audience after the Play. She felt vaguely drained and vaguely flat, and as if she had keyed herself up for rather more than had actually happened. Still, it had to be done; so she dragged on uniform winter skirt and blouse and blazer, knotted her tie, and went out to be social.

The Assembly Hall was full of a lot of very adult, cocktail-party chatter, echoing up to the painted ceiling. Lawrie, to her sister's astonishment, was off making herself very amusing to the person who had brought the flowers for Helen, who Nicola had rather expected to have been ejected from the premises. Nicola saw Mr and Mrs Merrick, _without_ any sign of Patrick or Thomasine. She smiled and waved, and was fallen on by her own family, or at least by her mother and Chas, who wanted to tell her all about his chicken-pox; and then by Rowan.

"I suppose this all could have been mine," said Rowan, looking about her with much the same expression with which she might have surveyed a headhunters' longhouse in Borneo, or a yak-butter-scented lamasery in Tibet. "You know, when you're on _This Is Your Life_, I shall say, I still recall the exact moment on which my little sister surpassed me..."

Nicola grinned and looked embarrassed, and took a sandwich from a plate being passed round by Bunty. "It has its moments," she admitted. "You get to hear what the Staff really think of people - a bit, at least - "

"I always think one's better off not knowing. Feet of clay, and all that. Clay all the way up to the elbows, in some cases," said Rowan, smiling sweetly as Miss Keith went past. "Who on earth was the girl playing Nefertiti - "

"_Pharaoh_,"

" - and why all the fuss about her? Local beauty queen?"

"Oh, that's just Helen," Nicola was able to casually say. "She's quite famous."

"All the stage presence of a steamed pudding, though." Rowan smiled and nodded politely to Mr and Mrs Merrick and extricated herself smoothly at the end of the good-evenings.

"My dear, _what_ an effort!" said Mrs Merrick, glowing in emerald-green satin cunningly draped.

Nicola was not at all sure how to respond to that. She asked after Thomasine instead, and came away, she couldn't see how, with the impression that Mr Merrick was a hugely doting papa and Patrick a hardly less doting brother, whereas Mrs Merrick herself was quite happy to leave it all in the hands of the very expensive nanny. "How - how _is_ Patrick?" she asked, and then wondered whether she would have been better off _not_ asking.

"Doing as well as can be expected," said Mr Merrick, beaming paternally. "I did ask him whether he'd seen anything of Ginty, but he said, not at all."

Nicola supposed he was trying to be reassuring, but honestly, how embarrassing, to have such things noticed by Mr Merrick. She excused herself as soon as possible, on the pretence of relieving Louise, who was circulating with a tray of sherries for the parents.

After a while the compliments, and the remarks about the school, and the guesses as to whether Nicola was herself or Lawrie, became terribly wearying. The crowd was beginning to thin out. Mrs Marlow came up to hug her, smelling, perplexingly, of the two-days-early scent of home, and congratulate her again on a job which Nicola hadn't realised had been all that well done.

It was all, Nicola thought, going on _far_ too long - longer, it felt, than the Play itself. Not that Lawrie seemed to be flagging. She, along with Elaine of all people, was still chattering vivaciously away to an elegant person with a Canadian accent and an expression of amused, sympathetic detachment which could not have been bettered by Miss Latimer herself.

"Are you all _right_, Nick?" asked Louise, appearing responsibly at Nicola's elbow. "You look worn out. I'd go to bed if I were you."

Nicola supposed that she must look like a wrung-out rag if _Louise_ had noticed. "I do hope that's not Lawrie spilling all to a gossip columnist," she said darkly.

"I shouldn't think so for a moment," said Louise sensibly. "I think she's some kind of aunt of Miranda's. An archivist, or something."

That sounded reassuringly respectable. And whilst, at any other time, she would have been delighted to meet an aunt of Miranda's, even the one who had become a nun, Nicola thought that just this time, she wouldn't. She felt stretched like old elastic, and more than anything, she wanted peace and quiet, and for the voices to stop revolving in her head.

\--

And then it was the last day of term. "A real review of a play _I_ was in," gloated Lawrie, tossing away the body of the paper and eagerly opening the Arts pages, "in a real paper!"

"It'll probably only be a mini bit," warned Barby. "It usually is in that paper."

"He _said_ it wouldn't be..." Lawrie spread the paper on the common room table, gave a cursory glance to the large photograph of Helen in costume, and read eagerly.

It was only a paragraph. She read it three times over.

"You'd better keep it in case Helen wants to read it," she said with an attempt at dignity, and stalked out of the room.

\--

"Where's Lawrie?" Daisy Lewis asked Nicola at lunchtime, just as Linda had asked before Mark Reading, and Esther immediately afterwards. Nicola said that she didn't know, and waved Daisy off to her own table; but just the same, she thought as she ate roast beef that might as well have been cardboard soaked in gravy for all she tasted of it, she probably better had look, before _Tim_ asked, and made herself unpleasant about the asking.

Lawrie was in none of her usual haunts; not, apparently, in any of the places that people seeking her for her address had been looking for her, not in the music-room where she occasionally went for some peace and quiet, not the common room, nor the form-room, nor the Theatre, nor her dormitory, nor - as Miranda suggested, quite madly, as Nicola kindly told her - saying goodbye to the netball courts.

"Well, let's go up to the roof, anyway," said Miranda. "Daddy will be here any minute."

It was on the roof that they found Lawrie. Nicola sat down beside her, and put her own coat over her improvident twin's hunched shoulders. "Lal - what on _earth_ is the matter?"

"Shall I find Tim?" suggested Miranda, tactfully.

Lawrie looked up. She looked rained-on, and had evidently been _drenched_ in tears before she had cried herself out to a series of dry and wrenching hiccups. "It wasn't a review of the Play at a-a-all! It was just a little jokey bit - _sneering_ \- and _wrong_, too, saying our uniform was a tartan mini-skirt. Can you see the likes of Olwen or Pomona lumping about in a tartan mini?"

"What, one between them?" said Nicola, rubbing circles between Lawrie's chilled shoulder-blades. "There'll be other reviews, you see. And when you're famous, you can _tell_ people about this one, and they'll laugh, the same way authors are always going on in prologues about their rejection letters."

"Oh, look, there's Daddy," said Miranda, looking out over the front drive and shrugging herself back into her home persona like an invisible coat, the way she had shrugged herself out of it at the beginning of term. "I'd better go - bye, Nick, bye Lawrie, have a great Christmas, write to me sometimes - " And she was gone.

"Have you packed?" Nicola asked Lawrie, though she knew it was a foolish question. Lawrie stared up at her, face woebegone, eyelashes spiky, mouth wobbling open, and generally looking about thirteen and as if she'd just stumbled out into the cold dawn at the end of a horror film besides. "Your _case_, clot. You'd better hurry or you won't be done in time for the train. It's a good thing they make us do the trunks days in advance."

"I haven't said goodbye to Tim!"

"I don't expect she's gone yet. I'll send her over to your dormitory if I see her." Nicola propelled her twin over towards the fire escape. As they walked back through the school - past Elaine Rees, harrassedly putting out a wire basket for returned library-books, past Olwen in an _improbable_ print frock, past a crocodile of very well-behaved Thirds carrying stacks of chairs, it felt as if school were being shaken up into pieces, like a jigsaw-puzzle, only to be put together again at the beginning of the next term.

There was an hour before they had to be ready for the train. Thinking, sensibly, best to stretch her legs before all that sitting, Nicola walked out towards the coast road, enjoying the wind from the sea, and the small, indecisive puffs of snow. She thought how, really, this term had been _nothing_ like how she had expected. There had been Miss Redmond, and the teams, and the Play, and the Wade House girls, and the trouble over the record-token...

She saw a group of girls, standing under the elm-trees exclaiming at the snow. They looked, she thought, rather like one of the covers for the School Magazine, all brightness against monochrome; two tall fairish figures and two short dark ones. Esther and Helen, Barby and Winnie, with Winnie front and centre to make sure that the school appealed to the overseas prospective-parent market...

Except that it wasn't like that at all. Esther and Helen and Barby and Winnie were a settled group, proper friends, and had been for some time; just as Jodie and Melissa had become a twosome, and Victorine had fallen in with Renée White. It was odd, Nicola thought, how people changed. Sometimes you were the person moving away, and sometimes the person left behind, and sometimes you felt like one but actually turned out to be the other, like a stopped train seeming to move when seen from the window of another train on a parallel track.

She lifted her face to the papery, snow-blowing sky. She could think about all that next term. She would be home soon. There would, she supposed, be Patrick.

And there would be Christmas.


End file.
